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CHILDREN'S    WAYS 


BEING   SELECTIONS   FROM    THE   AUTHOR'S 

"STUDIES    OF   CHILDHOOD," 

WITH    SOME   ADDITIONAL   MATTER 


BY 

JAMES  SULLY,   M.  A.,   LL.  D. 

GROTE    PROFESSOR    OF    PHILOSOPHY    OF    MIND    AND    LOGIC, 

UNIVERSITY    COLLEGE,     LONDON 

AUTHOR    OF    OUTLINES    OF    PSYCHOLOGY, 

STUDIES    OF    CHILDHOOD,    ETC. 

272  // 


NEW   YORK 
D.   APPLETON   AND  COMPANY 
1914 


2883 


Authorized  Edition. 


I'Pl 


PREFACE. 

The  kindly  welcome  accorded  by  the  press  to 
my  volume  Studies  of  Childhood  has  suggested 
to  me  that  there  was  much  in  it  which  might  be 
made  attractive  to  a  wider  class  of  readers  than 
that  addressed  in  a  psychological  work.  I  have, 
accordingly,  prepared  the  following  selections, 
cutting  out  abstruse  discussions,  dropping  as  far 
as  possible  technical  language,  and  adapting  the 
style  to  the  requirements  of  the  general  reader. 
In  order  to  shorten  the  work  the  last  two 
chapters — "  Extracts  from  a  Father's  Diary  " 
and  "  George  Sand's  Childhood  " — have  been 
omitted.  The  order  of  treatment  has  been 
altered  somewhat,  and  a  number  of  stories  has 
been  added.  I  hope  that  the  result  may 
succeed  in  recommending  what  has  long 
been  to  myself  one  of  the  most  delightful  of 
subjects  to  many  who  would  not  be  disposed  to 
read  a  larger  and  more  difficult  work,  and  to 
draw  on  a  few  of  these,  at  least,  to  a  closer  and 
more  serious  inspection  of  it 


CONTENTS. 


PART  I.— AT  PLAY. 

CHAPTER  rkon 

I.  The  Realm  of  Fancy •        •  i 

The  Transforming  Wand      •        •        •        •        >  2 

Fancy's  Resting-places 6 

In  Storyland •        •        .  8 

II.  The  Enchantment  of  Play.        •        •        •        •        .  13 

The  Young  Pretender  .•••••  13 

Mysteries  of  Dolldom  .••••.  18 

Serious  Side  of  Play 25 

PART  II.— AT  WORK. 

III.  Attacking  our  Language     ...••.  29 

The  Namer  of  Things   ...•••  30 

The  Sentence-builder  ..«,,.  33 

The  Interpreter  of  Words          .        •        •        .  36 

IV.  The  Serious  Searcher 40 

The  Thoughtful  Observer 40 

The  Pertinacious  Questioner      ....  44 

V.  First  Thoughts:   (a)  The  Natural  World     .        .  54 

The  Fashion  of  Things 54 

The  Bigger  World 58 

Dreams 61 

Birth  and  Growth 64 

VI.  First  Thoughts  :    {b)  Self  and  other  Mysteries    .  68 

The  Visible  Self 68 

The  Hidden  Self •        .  72 

The  Unreachable  Past 73 

The  Supernatural  World   .        .        •        .        .  76 

The  Great  Maker  .        .        .        •       •        •        .  78 


viii  Contents. 

CHAPTER  PAOB 

VII.  The  Battle  with  Fears  :   (a)  The  Onslaught        .  85 

The  Battery  of  Sounds 87 

The  Alarmed  Sentinel.        .        *        •        •        •  90 

VIII.  The  Battle  with  Fears  (Continued)  .        •        •        •  97 

The  Assault  of  the  Beasts        .        •        •        •  97 

The  Night  Attack          ...•••  100 

{b)  Damage  of  the  Onslaught     .        •        •        •  104 

(c)  Recovery  from  the  Onslaught     •        •        .  108 

^  IX.  Good  and  Bad  in  the  Making 112 

Traces  of  the  Brute    ...••.  112 

The  Promise  of  Humanity   .        •        •        •        •  119 

The  Lapse  into  Lying 124 

Fealty  to  Truth 131 

X.  Rebel  and  Subject 135 

(a)  The    Struggle   with    Law  :    First   Tussle 
with  Authority 135 

Evading  the  Law 137 

The  Plea  for  Liberty 140 

(b)  On  the  Side  of  Law 142 

The  Young  Stickler  for  the  Proprieties        .  143 

The  Enforcer  of  Rules 145 

XI.  At  the  Gate  of  the  Temple      .        .        .        «        •  151 

The  Greeting  of  Beauty      .        .        .        •        •  151 

First  Peep  into  the  Art-world  .        .        •        •  156 

\                    First  Ventures  in  Creation        .        .        •        «  161 

J    XII.  First  Pencillings 171 

The  Human  Face  Divinb 174 

The  Vile  Body  " 177 

Side  Views  of  Thing*  *«.*«•  184 


CHILDREN'S  WAYS. 

PART    I. 
AT  PLAY. 


CIL-\lM'£i<.  I. 

THE  REALM  OF  FANCY. 

One  of  the  few  things  we  seemed  to  be  certain  of 
with  respect  to  child-nature  was  that  it  is  fancy-full. 
Childhood,  we  all  know,  is  the  a^e  for  dreaming  ;  for 
living  a  lije  of  hagpy  make^ejieve.  Even  here, 
however,  we  want  more  accurate  observation.  For 
one  thing,  the  play  of  infantile  imagination  is  pro- 
bably mu^h  less  uniform  than  is  supposed.  There 
seem  to  be  very  serious  children  who  rarely,  if  ever, 
indulge  in  a  wild  fancy.  Mr.  Ruskin  has  recently 
told  us  that  when  a  child  he  was  incapable  of  acting 
a  part  or  telling  a  tale,  that  he  never  knew  a  child 
**  whose  thirst  for  visible  fact  was  at  once  so  eager  and 
so  methodic  ". 

One  may,  nevertheless,  safely  say  that  a  large 
majority  of  the  little  people  are,  for  a  time  at  least, 
fancy-bound.  A  child  that  did  not  want  to  play  and 
cared  nothing  for  the   marvels   of  storyland   would 


2  Children's  Ways. 

surely  be  regarded  as  queer  and  not  just  what  a  child 
ought  to  be. 

Supposing  that  this  is  the  correct  view,  there  still 
remains  the  question  whether  children's  imagination 
always  plays  in  the  same  fashion.  Now  science  is 
beginning  to  bring  to  light  differences  of  childish 
fancy.  For  one  thing  it  suggests  that  children  have 
their  favourite  type  of  mental  imagery,  that  one  child's 
fancy  may  habitually  move  in  a  coloured  world,  an- 
other in  a  w^ld  of  sounds,  and  so  forth.  The  fasci- 
nation of  Robinson  Crusoe  to  many  a  boy  lies  in  the 
wealth  of  images  of  movement  and  adventure  which 
it  supplies. 

With  this  difference  in  the  material  with  which  a 
child's  fancy  plays,  there  are  other  differences  which 
turn  on  his  temperament  and  predQ.minant  feelings. 
Hence,  the  familiar  fact  that  in  some  children  imagi- 
nation broods  by  preference  on  gloomy  and  alarming 
objects,  whereas  in  others  it  selects  what  is  bright  and 
gladsome. 

Perhaps  I  have  said  enough  to  justify  my  plea  for 
new  observations  and  for  a  reconsideration  of  hasty 
theories  in  the  light  of  these.  Nor  need  we  object  to 
a  fresh  survey  of  what  is  perhaps  the  most  delightful 
sid_e  of  child-life. 

(a)   The  Transforming  Wand, 

The  play  of  young  fancy  meets  us  in  the  very 
domain  of  the  senses :  it  is  active,  often  bewilderingly 
active,  when  the  small  person  seems  busily  engaged 
in  looking  at  things  and  moving  among  them. 

We  see  this  fanciful  "reading"  of  things  when  a 


The  Realm  of  Fancy.  3 

child  calls  the  star  an  "  eye,"  I  suppose  because  of  its 
brightness  and  its  twinkling  movement,  or  says  that 
a  dripping  plant  is  "  crying  ". 

This  transforming  touch  of  the  magic  wand  of 
young  fancy  has  something  of  crude  nature-poetry  in 
it,  This  is  abundantly  illustrated  in  what  may  be 
called  childish  metaphors,  by  which  they  try  to  de- 
scribe what  is  new  and  strange.  For  example,  a  little 
boy  of  nineteen  months  looking  at  his  mother's 
spectacles  said  :  "  Little  windows  ".  Another  boy  two 
years  and  five  months,  on  looking  at  the  hammers  of 
a  piano  which  his  mother  was  playing,  called  out: 
"  There  is  owlegie  "  (diminutive  of  owl).  His  eye  had 
instantly  caught  the  similarity  between  the  round 
felt  disc  of  the  hammer  divided  by  a  piece  of  wood, 
and  the  owl's  face  divided  by  its  beak.  In  like 
manner  another  little  boy  called  a  small  oscillating 
compass-needle  a  "  bird  "  probably  on  the  ground  of 
its  fluttering  movement.  Pretty  conceits  are  often 
resorted  to  in  this  effort  to  get  at  home  with  strange 
objects,  as  when  stars  were  described  by  one  child  as 
"  ciiiiiers  from  God's  stove,"  and  butterflies  as  "  pan^s 
fljang  ". 

This  play  of  imagination  upon  the  world  of  sense 
has  a  strong  vit^lis[ng  or  personifying  element.  A 
child  is  apt  to  attribute  life  and  sensation  to  what  we 
serious  people  regard  as  lifeless.  Thus  he  gives  not 
only  a  body  but  a  soul  to  the  wind  when  it  whistles  or 
howls  at  night  The  most  unpromising  things  come 
in  for  this  warrning,  life-giving  touch  of  a  chfld's  fancy. 
Thus  one  little  fellow,  aged  one  year  eight  months, 
conceived  a  special  fondness  for  the  letter  VV,  address- 
ing it  thus  :  "  Dear  old  boy  W  ".     Miss  Ingelow  tells 


4  Children's  Ways. 

us  that  when  a  child  she  used  to  feel  sorry  for  the 
pebbles  in  the  causeway  for  having  to  lie  always  in 
one  place,  and  would  carry  them  to  another  place  for 
a  change. 

It  is  hard  for  us  elders  to  get  back  to  this  childish 
way  of  looking  at  things.  One  may  however  hazard 
the  guess  that  there  is  in  it  a  measure  of  dreamy 
illusion.  This  means  that  only  a  paj;t  of  what  is 
present  is  seejij  the  part  which  makes  the  new  object 
like  the  old  and  familiar  one.  And  so  it  gets  trans- 
formed into  a  semblance  of  the  old  one ;  just  as  a 
rock  gets  transformed  for  our  older  eyes  into  the 
semblance  of  a  human  face. 

There  is  another  way  in  which  children's  fancy  may 
transmute  the  objects  of  sense.  Mr.  Ruskin  tells  us 
that  when  young  he  got  to  connect  or  "associate"  the 
name  "  crocodile "  so  closely  with  the  creature  that 
when  he  saw  it  printed  it  would  take  on  something  of 
the  look  of  the  beast's  lanky  body. 

How  far,  one  wonders,  does  this  process  of  trans- 
formation of  external  objects  go  in  the  case  of  imagi- 
native children  ?  It  is  not  improbable  that  before  the 
qualities  of  things  and  their  connections  one  with  an- 
other are  sufficiently  known  for  them  to  be  interesting 
in  themselves  they  often  acquire  interest  through  the 
interpretative  touch  of  childish  fancy. 

There  is  one  new  field  of  investigation  which  is 
illustrating  in  a  curious  way  the  wizard  influence 
wielded  by  childish  imagination  over  the  things  of 
sense.  It  is  well  known  that  a  certain  number  of 
people  habitually  "  colour "  the  sounds  they  hear, 
imagining,  for  example,  the  sound  of  a  particular 
vowel  or  musical  tone  to  have  its  characteristic  tint, 


The  Realm  of  Fancy.  ^ 

which  they  are  able  to  describe  accurately.  This 
"coloured  hearing,"  as  it  is  called,  is  always  traced 
back  to  the  dimly  recalled  age  of  childhood.  Children 
are  now  beginning  to  be  tested  as  to  their  possession 
of  this  trick  of  fancy.  It  was  found  in  the  case  of  a 
number  of  school-children  that  nearly  40  per  cent, 
described  the  tones  of  certain  instruments  as  coloured. 
There  was,  however,  no  agreement  among  these  chil- 
dren as  to  the  particular  tint  belonging  to  a  given 
sound:  thus  whereas  one  child  mentally  "  saw "  the 
tone  of  a  fife  as  pale  or  bright,  another  saw  it  as  dark. 

I  have  confined  myself  here  to  what  I  have  called 
the  play  of  imagination,  the  magical  transmuting  of 
things  through  the  sheer  liveliness  of  childish  fancy. 
The  degree  of  transmutation  will  of  cour.se  vary  with 
the  intensity  of  the  imagination.  Sometimes  when  a 
child  dwells  on  the  fancy  it  may  grow  into  a  moment- 
ary illusion.  A  little  girl  of  four,  sitting  by  the  side 
of  her  mother  in  the  garden,  picked  up  a  small  pink 
worm  and  said :  "  Ah  I  you  do  look  nice ;  how  a 
thrush  would  like  you ! "  and  thereupon,  realising  the 
part  of  the  fortunate  thrush,  proceeded,  to  her  mother's 
horror,  to  eat  up  the  worm  quite  composedly.  The 
momentary  illusion  of  something  nice  to  eat,  here 
produced  by  a  lively  realisation  of  a  part,  may  arise  in 
other  cases  from  strong  feeling,  more  especially  fear, 
which,  as  we  shall  see,  has  so  large  a  dominion  over 
the  young  mind. 

This  witchcraft  of  the  young  fancy  in  veiling  and 
transforming  the  actual  surroundings  is  a  good  deal 
restrained  by  the  practical  needs  of  every-day  life  and 
by  intercourse  with  older  and  graver  folk.  There  are, 
however,   regions   of   child-life   where   it   knows    na 


6  Children's  Ways. 

check.  One  of  these  is  child's  play,  to  be  spoken  of 
presently:  another  is  the  filling  up  of  the  blank  spaces 
in  the  visible  world  with  the  products  of  fancy.  We 
will  call  these  regions  on  which  the  young  wing  of 
fancy  is  wont  to  alight  and  rest,  fancy's  resting- 
places. 

Fancy's  Resting-places, 

Most  people,  perhaps,  can  recall  from  their  child- 
hood the  pleasure  of  cloud-gazing.  The  clouds  are 
such  strange-looking  things,  they  change  their  forms 
so  quickly,  they  seem  to  be  doing  so  many  things, 
now  slumbering  lazily,  now  rushing  wildly  on.  Cloud- 
land  is  safe  away  from  the  scrutiny  of  fingers,  so  we 
never  can  be  sure  what  they  would  be  if  we  got  to 
them.  Some  children  take  fright  at  their  big,  strange 
forms  and  their  weird  transformations :  but  a  happy 
child  that  loves  day-dreaming  will  spend  many  de- 
lightful hours  in  fashioning  these  forms  into  wondrous 
and  delightful  things,  such  as  kings  and  queens,  giants 
and  dwarfs,  beautiful  castles,  armies  marching  to  battle, 
or  driven  in  flight,  pirates  sailing  over  fair  isle-dotted 
seas.  There  is  a  delicious  satisfaction  to  young  minds 
in  thus  finding  a  habitation  for  their  cherished  images. 
(To  project  them  in  this  \vay  into  the  visible  world,  to 
know  that  they  are  located  in  that  spot  beiore  the 
eye,  is  to  "  realise  "  therri.  In  the  sense  of  giving  them 
the  fullest  possible  reality. 

Next  to  the  cloud-world  come  distant  parts  of  the 
terrestrial  scene.  The  chain  of  hills,  perhaps,  faintly 
visible  from  the  home,  has  been  again  and  again  en- 
dowed by  a  child's  fancy  with  all  manner  of  wondrous 
scenery  and  peopled  by  all  manner  of  strange  creatures. 


The  Realm  of  Fancy.  7 

At  times  when  they  have  shown  a  soft  blue,  he  has 
made  fairy-land  of  them  ;  at  other  times  when  stand- 
ing out  black  and  fierce-looking  against  the  western 
sky  at  eventide,  he  has  half  shuddered  at  them, 
peopling  them  with  horrid  monsters. 

Best  of  all,  I  think,  for  this  locating  of  images,  are 
the  hidden  spaces  of  the  visible  world.  One  child 
used  to  wonder  what  was  hidden  behind  a  long  stretch 
of  wood  which  closed  in  a  good  part  of  his  horizon. 
Many  a  child  has  had  his  day-dreams  about  the  country 
lying  beyond  the  hills  on  the  horizon.  One  little  girl 
who  lived  on  a  cattle-station  in  Australia  used  to 
locate  beyond  a  low  range  of  hills  a  family  of  children 
whom  she  called  her  little  girls,  and  about  whom  she 
related  endless  stories. 

With  timid  children  this  tendency  to  project  images 
into  unseen  places  becomes  a  fearful  kind  of  wonder, 
not  altogether  unpleasant  when  confined  to  a  moderate 
intensity.  I  remember  the  look  of  awe  on  the  face  of 
a  small  boy  whose  hand  I  held  as  we  passed  one 
summer  evening  a  dark  wood,  and  he  whispered  to 
me  that  the  wolves  lived  in  that  wood. 

This  impulse  of  timid  children  to  project  their  dark 
fancies  into  obscure  and  hidden  places  often  stops  short 
at  vague  undefinable  conjecture.  "  When  (writes  a 
German  author)  I  was  a  child  and  we  played  hide 
and  seek  in  the  barn,  I  always  felt  that  there  must  or 
might  be  something  unheard  of  hidden  away  behind 
every  bundle  of  straw,  and  in  the  corners."  Here  we 
can  hardly  speak  of  a  housing  of  images :  at  such  a 
moment  perhaps  the  little  brain  has  such  a  rush  of 
weird  images  that  no  one  grows  distinct. 

The  exact  opposite  of  this  is  where  a  child  has  a 


8  Children's  Ways. 

very  definite  image  in  his  mind,  and  wants  to  find  a 
home  for  it  in  the  external  world.  This  wish  seems 
to  be  particularly  active  in  relation  to  the  images 
derived  from  stories.  This  housing  instinct  is  strong 
in  the  case  of  the  poor  houseless  fairies.  One  little 
boy  put  his  fairies  in  the  wall  of  his  bedroom,  where, 
I  suppose,  he  found  it  convenient  to  reach  them  by 
his  prayers.  His  sister  located  a  fairy  in  a  hole  in  a 
smallish  stone. 

As  with  the  fancies  born  of  fairy-tales,  so  with  the 
images  of  humbler  human  personages  known  by  way  of 
books.  Charles  Dickens,  when  a  child,  had  a  strong 
impulse  to  locate  the  characters  of  his  stories  in  the 
immediate  surroundings.  He  tells  us  that  "every 
barn  in  the  neighbourhood,  every  stone  of  the  church, 
every  foot  of  the  churchyard  had  some  association  of 
its  own  in  my  mind  connected  with  these  books 
{Roderic  Random^  Tom  Jones,  Gil  Bias,  etc.),  and 
stood  for  some  locality  made  famous  in  them.  I 
have  seen  Tom  Pipes  go  climbing  up  the  church 
steeple  ;  I  have  watched  Strap  with  the  knapsack  on 
his  back  stopping  to  rest  himself  on  the  wicket-gate." 

In  Storyland. 

The  reference  to  stories  naturally  brings  us  to 
another  domain  of  children's  imagination  :  the  new 
world  opened  up  by  their  story-books,  which  is  all 
strange  and  far  away  from  the  nursery  where  they  sit 
and  listen,  and  in  which,  nevertheless,  they  manage 
in  a  sense  to  live  and  make  a  new  home. 

How  is  it,  one  is  disposed  to  ask,  that  most  children, 
at  any  rate,  have  their  imagination  laid  hold  of,  and 


The  Realm  of  Fancy.  9 

fired  to  a  white  heat,  by  mere  words  ?  To  watch  the 
small  listener  in  its  low  chair,  with  head  raised,  eyes 
fixed,  and  hands  clasped,  drinking  in  every  word  of 
your  story,  giving  sign  by  occasional  self-cuddling 
and  other  spasmodic  movements  of  the  almost  over- 
powering delight  which  fills  its  breast,  is  to  be  face  to 
face  with  what  is  a  mystery  to  most  "  grown-ups ". 
Perhaps  we  elders,  who  are  apt  to  think  that  we  have 
acquired  all  the  knowledge  and  to  forget  how  much 
we  have  lost,  will  never  understand  the  spell  of  a 
story  for  the  lively  impressionable  brain  of  a  child 
One  thing,  however,  is  pretty  certain  :  our  words  have 
a  way  of  calling  up  in  children's  minds  very  vivid 
and  very  re^l  images  of  things,  images  quite  unlike 
those  \vhich  are  called  up  in  the  minds  of  most  older 
people.  This  magic  power  of  a  word  to  summon  the 
corresponding  image,  has,  I  suspect,  a  good  deal  to  do 
with  a  child's  intense  way  of  realising  his  stories. 

The  passionate  interest  in  stories  means  more 
than  this  however.  It  means  that  the  little  brain 
is  wondrously  deft  at  disentangling  our  rather  hard 
language  and  reducing  the  underlying  ideas  to  an 
intelligible  simplicity.  A  mother  when  reading  a 
poem  to  her  boy  of  six,  ventured  to  remark,  "  I'm 
afraid  you  can't  understand  it,  dear,"  for  which  she 
got  rather  roughly  snubbed  by  her  little  master  in 
this  fashion  :  "  Oh,  yes,  I  can  very  well,  if  only  you 
would  not  explain".  ,The  "explaining"  is  resented 
because  it  interrupts  the  chijd's  own  secret  art  of 
"making  somethLng  "  out  of  our  words.^ 

And  what  glorious  inner  visions  the  skilful  little  in- 
terpreter often  manages  to  get  from  these  troublesome 
words  of  ours.      Scene  after  scene  of  the  dissolving 


lO  Children's  Ways. 

view  unfolds  itself  in  definite  outline  and  magical 
colouring.  At  each  stage  the  anticipation  of  the  next 
undiscernible  stage  is  a  thrilling  mystery.  Perhaps 
no  one  has  given  us  a  better  account  of  the  state  of 
dream-like  absorption  in  storyland  than  Thacj<eray. 
In  one  of  his  deligiitful  "  Roundabout  Papers/'  he 
thus  writes  of  the  experiences  of  early  boyhood : 
"  Hush !  I  never  read  quite  to  the  end  of  my  first 
Scottish  Chiefs.  I  couldn't.  I  peeped  in  an  alarmed 
furtive  manner  at  some  of  the  closing  pages.  .  .  . 
Oh,  novels,  sweet  and  delicious  as  the  raspberry  open 
tarts  of  budding  boyhood  !  Do  I  forget  one  night 
after  prayers  (when  we  under-boys  were  sent  to  bed) 
lingering  at  my  cupboard  to  read  one  little  half-page 
more  of  my  dear  Walter  Scott — and  down  came  the 
monitor's  dictionary  on  my  head  !" 

i^The  intensity  of  the  delight  is  seen  in  the  greed^it 
generates. )  Who  can  resist  a  child's  hungry  demand 
for  a  siory  ?  and  after  you  have  satisfied  his  first 
request,  he  will  ask  for  more,  and  if  then  you  are 
weak  enough  to  say  you  know  no  more  stories  he 
will  catch  you  by  answering :  "  Tell  me  the  same 
again  ". 

(.'As  a  resjult  of  the  intensity  with  which  a  child's 
imagination  seizes  on  a  narrative  it  teoJ^  to  become 
afterv/ards  a  record  of  fact,  a  true  history.)  That 
children  look  at  their  stories  in  this  way  till  they 
get  undeceived  seems  to  be  shown  by  the  respect 
which  they  pay  to  the  details  and  even  to  the  words. 
Woe  to  the  unfortunate  mother  who  in  repeating  one 
of  the  good  stock  nursery  tales  varies  a  detail.  One 
such,  a  friend  of  mine,  when  relating  "  Puss  in  Boots" 

inadvertently  made  the  hero  sit  on  a  chair  instead  of 


The  Realm  of  Fancy.  1 1 

on  a  box  to  pull  on  his  boots.  She  was  greeted  by 
a  sharp  volley  of  "  Noes  !  " 

As  the  demand  for  faithful  repetition  of  story 
shows,('the  imaginative  realisation  continues  when  the 
story^is  no  longer  heard  or  read.  It  has  added  to  the 
child's  self-created  world  new  territory,  in  which  he 
may  wander  and  live  blissful  moments. )  This  per- 
manent occupation  of  storyland  is  shown  in  the 
child's  impulse  to  bring  the  figures  of  story-books 
into  the  actual  surroundings.  It  is  shown,  too,  in  his 
fondness  for  introducing  them  into  his  play,  of  which 
I  shall  speak  presently. 

To  this  lively  imaginative  reception  of  what  is  told 
him  the  child  is  apt  very  soon  to  join  his  own  free 
inventions  of  fairy  and  other  tales.  These  at  first, 
and  for  some  time,  have  in  them  more  of  play  than 
of  serious  art,  and  so  can  be  touched  on  here  where 
we  are  dealing  with  the  play  of  young  fancy. 

We  see  the  beginning  of  such  fanciful  invention  in 
childish  "romancing"  which  is  often  started  by  the 
sight  of  some  real  object.  For  example,  a  little  boy 
aged  three  and  a  half  years  seeing  a  tramp  limping 
along  with  a  bad  leg  exclaimed  :  "  Look  at  that  poor 
ole  man,  mamma  ;  he  has  dot  (got)  a  bad  leg".  Then 
romancing,  as  he  was  now  wont  to  do :  "  He  dot  on  a 
very  big  'orse,  and  he  fell  off  on  some  great  big  stone, 
and  he  hurt  his  poor  leg  and  he  had  to  get  a  big 
stick.  We  must  make  it  well."  Then  after  a 
thoughtful  pause :  "  Mamma,  go  and  kiss  the  place 
and  put  some  powdey  (powder)  on  it  and  make  it  well 
like  you  do  to  I  ".  Later  on  children  of  an  imagina- 
tive turn  wax  bolder  and  spin  longer  stories  and 
create  scenes  and  persons  with  whom  they  live  in 


12  Children's  Ways, 

a  prolonged  companionship.  But  of  this  more  pre* 
sently. 

Partly  by  taking  in  and  fully  realising  the  wonders 
of  story,  partly  by  a  more  spontaneous  play  of  crea- 
tive fancy,  children's  minds  often  pass  under  the 
dominion  of  more  or  less  enduring  myths.  The  princes 
and  princesses  and  dwarfs  and  gnomes  of  fairy-tale, 
the  generous  but  discriminating  old  gentleman  who 
brings  Christmas  presents,  as  well  as  the  beings 
fashioned  by  the  more  original  sort  of  child  for  himself, 
these  live  on  just  like  the  people  of  the  every-day 
world,  are  apt  to  appear  in  dreams,  in  the  dark,  at 
odd  dreamy  moments  during  the  day,  bringing  into 
the  child's  life  golden  sunlight  or  black  awful 
shadows,  and  making  in  many  cases,  for  a  time  at 
least,  the  most  real  of  all  realities. 

I  am  far  from  saying  that  all  children  make  a  fancy 
world  for  themselves  in  this  way.  As  I  said  at  the 
beginning  of  the  chapter  the  differences  among  chil- 
dren in  this  respect  are  great.  Yet  I  think  it  is  safe 
to  say  that  most  children,  and  especially  lonely  chil- 
dren who  have  not  a  full  active  life  provided  for 
them  by  companions  and  opportunities  of  adventure, 
do  live  a  good  fraction  of  their  life  in  dreamland. 

Where  the  active  life  is  provided  a  child  is  apt  to 
play  rather  than  lose  himself  passively  in  fancy 
dreams.  But  play,  too,  is  to  a  large  extent  a  product 
of  the  liveliness  of  the  young  imagination.  We  will 
now  glance  at  it  in  this  light 


CHAPTER  II. 

THE  ENCHANTMENT  OF  PLAY. 

Children's  "  play,"  as  the  expression  is  commonly 
understood,  differs  from  the  sportive  movements  of 
fancy  considered  in  the  last  chapter  by  its  essentially 
active  character.  We  do  not  speak  of  a  child  playing 
save  when  he  does  something,  however  slight,  by  way 
of  expressing  or  acting  out  a  fancy.  This  outer  ex- 
pression of  fancy  in  some  active  form  is  commonly 
called  by  children  themselves  "  pretending  "to  be  or 
to  do  something,  by  older  people  when  looking  back 
on  the  pretence  "making-believe".  In  order  to 
understand  what  childish  fancy  is  like,  and  how  it 
works,  we  must  carefully  watch  it  as  it  moves  among 
the  toys  and  creates  a  new  play- world. 

The   Young  Pretender, 

(Child's  play  is  a  kind  of  creation  of  a  make-believe 
but  half-real  world.)  As  such,  it  has  its  primal  source 
in  the  impulse  to  act  out  and  embody  in  sensible  form 
some  interesting  idea ;  in  which  respect,  as  we  shall 
see  by-and-by,  it  has  a  close  kinship  to  what  we  call 
art.  The  image,  say  of  the  wood,  of  the  chivalrous 
highwayman,  or  what  not,  holds  the  child's  brain,  and 
everything  has  to  accommodate  itself  to  the  mastering 
force. 


14  Children's  Ways. 

Now  since  play  is  the  acting  out  of  some  interesting 
and  exciting  fancy,  it  comes  at  once  into  collision  with 
the  child's  actual  surroundings.  Here,  however,  he 
finds  his  opportunity.  The  floor  of  the  room  is 
magically  transformed  into  a  prairie,  a  sea,  or  other 
locality,  the  hidden  space  under  the  table  becomes  a 
robber's  cave,  a  chair  serves  as  horse,  ship,  or  other 
vehicle,  to  suit  the  exigencies  of  the  particular  play. 
f'  The  passion  for  play  is  essentially  active  ;  it  is  the 
wild  longing  to  act  a  part ;  it  is  thus  in  a  way 
dramatic.  The  child-adventurer  as  he  personates 
Robinson  Crusoe  or  other  hero  becomes  another 
being.  And  in  stepping,  so  to  say,  out  of  his  every- 
day self  he  has  to  step  out  of  his  every-day  world. 
Hence  the  transformation  of  his  surroundings  by  what 
has  been  called  the  "  alchemy  of  imagination  ".  Even 
a  sick  child  confined  to  his  bed  will,  as  Mr.  Stevenson 
tells  us  in  his  pretty  child's  song,  "  The  Land  of 
Counterpane,"  make  these  transformations  of  his 
surroundings : — 

And  sometimes  for  an  hour  or  so 
I  watched  my  leaden  soldiers  go, 
With  different  uniforms  and  drills, 
Among  the  bed-clothes  through  the  hills; 

And  sometimes  sent  my  ships  in  fleets, 
All  up  and  down  among  the  sheets; 
Or  brought  my  trees  and  houses  out, 
And  planted  cities  all  about. 

The  impulse  to  act  a  part,  which  is  the  very  life- 
breath  of  play,  meets  us  in  a  crude  form  very  early* 
Even  an  infant  will,  if  there  is  a  cup  at  hand,  seem  to 
go  through  something  like  a  pretence  of  drinking.     A 


The  Enchantment  of  Play.  15 

little  boy  of  about  eighteen  months  who  was  digging 
in  the  garden  began  suddenly  to  play  at  having  a 
bath.  He  got  into  the  big  bucket  he  was  using  for 
digging,  took  a  handful  of  earth  and  dribbled  it  over 
him,  saying,  "  'Ponge,  'ponge,"  and  then  stepped  out 
and  asked  for  "  Tow'l,  tow'l  ",  Another  boy  less  than 
two  would  spend  a  whole  wet  afternoon  enjoying  his 
make-believe  "  painting  "  of  the  furniture  with  the  dry 
end  of  a  bit  of  rope. 

There  is  no  need  to  suppose  that  in  this  simple  kind  • 
of  imitative  make-believe  children  know  that  they  are 
acting   a   part.      It   is   surely  to  misunderstand  the 
essence  of  play  to  speak  of  it  as  a  kind  of  conscious 
performance,  like  that  of  the  stage-actor.     A  child  is  I 
one  creature  when  he  is  truly  at  play,  another  when  J 
he  is  bent  on  astonishing  or  amusing  you.'   When 
absorbed  in  play  the  last  thing  he  is  thinking  of  is  a 
spectator.     As  we  know,  the  intrusion  of  a  grown-up  , 
\  is  very  apt  to  mar  children's  play,  by  calling  them/ 
\back  to  the  dull  world  of  every-day. 

This  impulse  to  get  away  from  his  common  and 
tiresome  self  into  a  new  part  will  often  carry  a  child 
rather  far.  Not  only  does  he  want  to  be  a  prince,  or 
a  fairy,  he  will  even  make  an  attempt  to  become  an 
animal.  He  will  greatly  enjoy  going  on  all  fours  and 
making  dreadful  noises  if  only  he  has  a  play-com- 
panion to  be  frightened  ;  and  possibly  he  does  get 
some  way  towards  feeling  like  the  bloodthirsty  lion 
whom  he  fancies  himself. 

It  is  worth  noting  that  such  passing  out  of  one's 
ordinary  self  and  assuming  a  foreign  existence  is  con- 
fined to  the  child-player.  A  cat  or  a  dog  will  be 
quite  ready  to  go  through  a  kind  of  make-believe 


1 6  Children's  Ways. 

game,  yet  even  in  its  play  the  cat  remains  the  cat, 

and  the  dog  the  dog. 

Such  play-like  transmutation  of  the  self  is  some- 
times carried  over  longer  periods.  A  child  will  play 
at  being  something  for  a  whole  day.  For  example, 
a  boy  of  three  and  a  half  years  would  one  day  lead 
the  life  of  a  coal-heaver,  another  day  that  of  a  soldier, 
and  so  forth,  and  was  rather  particular  in  expecting 
his  mother  to  remember  which  of  his  favourite  char- 
acters he  was  adopting  on  this  or  that  day. 

In  a  good  deal  of  this  play-action  there  is  scarcely 
any  adjustment  of  scene  :  the  child  of  vigorous  fancy 
plays  out  his  part  with  imaginary  surroundings. 
Children  in  their  second  year  will  act  out  a  scene 
purely  by  means  of  pantomimic  movements.  Thus 
one  little  fellow  not  quite  two  years  old  would,  when 
taken  out  in  his  perambulator,  amuse  himself  by 
putting  out  his  hand  and  pretending  to  catch  "  little 
micies"  (mice),  which  make-believe  little  rodents  he 
proceeded  to  cuddle  and  to  stroke,  winding  up  his  play 
by  throwing  them  away,  or  handing  them  over  to  his 
mother.  In  like  manner  he  would  pretend  to  feed 
chickens,  taking  imaginary  food  with  one  hand  out  of 
the  other,  and  scattering  it  with  an  accompaniment 
of  "  Chuck !  chuck  !  chuck  !  " 

This  tendency  of  the  little  player  to  conjure  up 
new  surroundings,  and  to  bring  to  his  side  desirable 
companions,  is,  I  suspect,  common  among  lonely 
children.  One  little  fellow  of  four  passed  much  of  his 
time  in  journeyings  to  Edinburgh,  "  London  town," 
China  and  so  forth  in  quest  of  his  two  little  boys  who 
roved  about  with  their  "  mamsey,"  a  "Mrs.  Cock". 
They  paid  him  visits  when  he  was  alone,  always  con- 


The  Enchantment  of  Play.  17 

triving  to  depart  "just  two  tiny  minutes"  before  any 
one  came  in.^  Mr.  Canton's  little  heroine  took  to 
nursing  an  invisible  "  iccle  gaal  "  (little  girl),  of  whose 
presence  she  seemed  perfectly  assured.'^ 

If  only  the  young  imagination  is  strong  enough^ 
there  may  be  more  of  sweet  illusion,  of  a  warm  grasp 
of  living  reality  in  this  solitary  play,  where  fictitious 
companions,  perfectly  obedient  to  the  little  player's 
will,  take  the  place  of  less  controllable  ones.  Yet 
this  kind  of  play,  which  derives  no  support  from  the 
surroundings,  makes  heavy  demands  on  the  imagina- 
tion, and  would  not,  one  suspects,  satisfy  most  children. 

The  character  of  the  little  player's  actual  surround- 
ings is,  for  the  most  part,  a  matter  of  small  concern  to 
him.  If  only  he  has  a  dark  corner  and  a  piece  of 
furniture  or  two  he  can  build  his  play-scene. 

What  he  does  want  is  some  semblance  of  a  living 
companion.  Whatever  his  play  he  needs  somebody, 
if  only  as  listener  to  his  make-believe  ;  and  when  his 
imagination  cannot  rise  to  an  invisible  auditor,  he 
will  talk  to  such  unpromising  things  as  a  sponge  in 
the  bath,  a  fire-shovel,  or  a  clothes-prop  in  the  garden. 
In  more  active  sorts  of  play,  where  something  has  to 
be  done,  he  will  commonly  want  a  living  companion. 

In  this  making  of  play-companions  we  see  again  the 
transforming  power  of  a  child's  fancy.  Mr.  Ruskin 
speaks  somewhere  of  "the  perfection  of  child-like 
imagination,  the  power  of  making  everything  out  of 
nothing".  This  delightful  secret  of  childhood  is  illus- 
trated in  its  fondness  for  toys  and  its  way  of  be- 
having towards  them. 

*  From  a  paper  by  Mrs.  Robert  Jardine. 

•  The  Invisible  Playmate,  p.  33  ff. 


1 8  Children's  Ways. 

Later  on,  I  think,  children  are  apt  to  grow  more 
sophisticated,  to  pay  more  attention  to  their  surround- 
ings, and  to  require  more  reaHstic  accessories  for  their 
play  actions.  This,  at  least  Dr.  Stanley  Hall  tells  us, 
is  true  of  doll-plays. 


Mysteries  of  Dolldom. 

The  fact  that  children  make  living  things  out  of 
their  toy  horses,  dogs  and  the  rest  is  known  to  every 
observer  of  their  ways.  To  the  natural  unsceptical 
eye  the  boy  on  his  rudely  carved  "  gee-gee  "  slashing 
the  dull  flank  with  all  a  boy's  glee,  looks  as  if  he  were 
possessed  with  the  fancy  that  the  rigid  inert-looking 
block  which  he  bestraddles  is  a  very  horse. 

This  breathing  of  life  into  playthings  is  seen  in  all 
its  magic  force  in  play  with  dolls.  A  doll,  broadly 
conceived,  is  anything  which  a  child  carries  about 
and  makes  a  pet  of  The  toy  horse,  dog  or  what  not 
that  a  little  boy  nurses,  feeds  and  takes  to  bed  with 
him  has  much  of  the  dignity  of  a  true  doll.  But 
adopting  conventional  distinctions  we  shall  confine 
the  word  to  those  things  which  are  more  or  less 
endowed  by  childish  fancy  with  human  form  and 
character.  ^ 

I  read  somewhere  recently  that  the  doll  is  a  play- 
thing for  girls  only :  but  young  boys,  though  they 
often  prefer  india-rubber  horses  and  other  animals,  not 
infrequently  go  through  a  stage  of  doll-love  also,  and 
are  hardly  less  devoted  than  girls. 

Endless  is  the  variety  of  role  assigned  to  the  doll. 
It  is  the  all-important  comrade  in  that  solitude  h  deux 
of  which  the  child,  like  the  adult,  is  so  fond.     Mrs. 


The  Enchantment  of  Play.  19 

Burnett  tells  us  that  when  nursing  her  doll  in  the 
armchair  of  the  parlour  she  would  sail  across  en- 
chanted seas  to  enchanted  islands  having  all  sorts  of 
thrilling  adventures. 

Very  tenderly,  on  the  whole,  is  the  little  doll-lover 
wont  to  use  her  pet,  doing  her  best  to  keep  it  clean 
and  tidy,  feeding  it,  putting  it  to  bed,  amusing  it,  for 
example,  by  showing  it  her  pictures,  tending  it  with 
fidelity  during  bouts  of  sickness,  and  giving  it  the 
honours  of  a  funeral  when,  from  the  attack  of  a  dog 
set  on  by  an  unfeeling  brother  or  other  cause,  it  comes 
to  "  die  "  ;  ^  or  when,  as  in  the  case  of  little  Jane  Welsh 
(afterwards  Mrs.  Carlyle),  the  time  has  come  for  the 
young  lady  to  cast  aside  her  dolls. 

The  doll-interest  implies  a  deep  mysterious  sympa- 
thy. Children  wish  their  dolls  to  share  in  their  things, 
to  be  kissed  when  they  are  kissed,  and  so  to  come 
close  to  them  in  experience  and  feeling.  Not  only  so, 
they  look  for  sympathy  from  their  doll-companions, 
taking  to  them  all  their  childish  troubles.  So  far  is 
this  feeling  of  oneness  carried  in  some  cases  that  the 
passion  for  dolls  has  actually  rendered  the  child  in- 
different to  child-companions.  It  is  not  every  little 
girl  who  like  little  Maggie  Tulliver  has  only  "occasional 
fits  of  fondness  "  for  her  nursling  when  the  brother  is 
absent. 

Not  only  in  this  lavishing  of  tenderness  and  of 
sympathy  on  the  doll,  but  in  the  occasional  discharge 
on  it  of  a  fit  of  anger,  children  show  how  near  it  comes 
to  a  human  companion.     The  punishment  of  the  doll 

*  I  owe  this  and  other  observations  on  the  treatment  of  dolls  to 
Dr.  Stanley  Hall's  curious  researches. 


20  Children's  Ways. 

is  an  important  element  in  nursery-life.  It  is  apt  to 
be  carried  out  with  formal  solemnity  and  often  with 
something  of  brutal  emphasis.  Vet  tenderness  being 
the  strongest  part  of  the  doll-attachment,  the  little 
disciplinarians  are  apt  to  suffer  afterwards  for  their 
cruelty,  one  little  girl  showing  remorse  after  such  a 
chastisement  of  her  pet  for  several  days. 

I  have  talked  here  of  "  dolls,"  but  1  must  not  be 
supposed  to  be  speaking  merely  of  the  lovely  creatures 
with  blue  eyes  and  yellow  hair  with  which  the  well-to- 
do  child  is  wont  to  be  supplied.  iNothing  is  more 
strange  and  curious  in  child-life  than  its  art  of  manu- 
facturing dolls  out  of  the  most  unpromising  materials. 
The  creative  child  can  find  something  to  nurse  and 
fondle  and  take  to  bed  with  it  in  a  bundle  of  hay  tied 
round  with  a  string,  in  a  shawl,  a  pillow,  a  stick,  a 
clothes-pin,  or  a  clay-pipe.  Victor  Hugo,  with  a  true 
touch,  makes  the  little  outcast  Cosette,  who  has  never 
had  a  "  real  doll,"  fashion  one  out  of  a  tiny  leaden 
sword  and  a  rag  or  two,  putting  it  to  sleep  in  her  arms 
with  a  soft  lullaby. 

Do  any  of  us  really  understand  the  child's  attitude 
of  mind  towards  its  doll?  Although  gifted  writers 
like  George  Sand  have  tried  to  take  us  back  to  the 
feeling  of  childhood,  it  may  be  doubted  whether  they 
have  made  it  intelligible  to  us.  And  certainly  the 
answers  to  questions  collected  in  America  have  done 
little,  if  anything,  towards  making  it  clear.  The 
truth  is  that  the  perfect  child's  faith  in  dolldom  passes 
away  early,  in  most  cases  it  would  appear  about  the 
age  of  thirteen  or  fourteen.  It  is  then  that  the  young 
people  begin  clearly  to  realise  the  shocking  fact  that 
dolls  have  no  "inner  life".     Occasionally  girls  will  go 


The  Enchantment  of  Play.  21 

on  playing  with  dolls  much  later  than  this,  but  not 
surely  with  the  old  sincerity. 

That  many  children  have  a  genuine  delusion  about 
their  dolls  seems  evident.  That  is  to  say  when  they 
talk  to  them  and  otherwise  treat  them  as  human  they 
imaginatively  realise  that  they  can  understand  and 
feel.  The  force  of  the  illusion,  blotting  out  from  the 
child's  view  the  naked  reality  before  its  eyes,  is  a 
striking  illustration  of  the  vividness  of  early  fancy. 
Perhaps,  too,  this  intensity  of  faith  comes  in  part  of 
the  strength  of  the  impulses  which  commonly  sustain 
the  doll-passion.  Of  these  the  instinct  of  compan-\ 
ionship,  of  sympathy,  is  the  strongest.  A  lady  tells 
me  she  remembers  that  when  a  child  she  had  a 
passionate  longing  for  a  big,  big  doll,  which  would 
give  her  the  full  sweetness  of  cuddling.  The  imita- 
tive impulse,  too,  prompting  the  child  to  carry  out  on 
the  doll  actions  similar  to  those  carried  out  on  itself 
by  mother  and  nurse,  is  a  strong  support  of  the 
delusion.  A  doll,  as  the  odd  varieties  selected  show, 
seems  to  be,  more  than  anything  else,  something  to 
be  dressed.  Children's  reasons  for  preferring  one  doll 
to  another,  as  that  it  can  have  its  face  washed,  or  that 
it  has  real  hair  which  can  be  combed,  show  how  the 
impulse  to  carry  out  nursery  operations  sustains  the 
feeling  of  attachment.  A  girl  (the  same  that  wanted 
the  big  doll  to  fondle)  had  dolls  of  the  proper  sort  ; 
yet  she  preferred  to  make  one  out  of  a  little  wooden 
stool,  because  she  could  more  realistically  act  out  with 
this  odd  substitute  the  experience  of  taking  her  pet 
out  for  a  walk,  making  it  stand,  for  example,  when 
she  met  a  friend. 

Of  course,  the  child's  faith,  like  other  faith,  is  not 


22  Children's  Ways. 

always  up  to  the  height  of  perfect  ardour.  A  child  of 
six  or  seven,  when  the  passion  for  dolls  is  apt  to  be 
strong,  will  have  moments  of  coolness,  leaving  "  poor 
dolly"  lyi'ng  in  the  most  humiliating  posture  on  the 
floor,  or  throwing  it  away  in  a  sudden  fit  of  disenchant- 
ment and  disgust  Scepticism  will  intrude,  especially 
when  the  hidden  **  inside "  comes  to  view  as  mere 
emptiness,  or  at  best  as  nothing  but  sawdust. 

Children  seem,  as  George  Sand  says,  to  oscillate 
between  the  real  and  the  impossible.  Yet  the  intru- 
sion of  doubt  does  not,  in  many  cases  at  least,  interfere 
with  an  enduring  trust.  Dr.  Stanley  Hall  tells  us  that 
"  long  after  it  is  known  that  they  are  wood,  wax,  etc, 
it  is  felt  that  they  are  of  skin,  flesh,  etc.".  Yes,  that  is 
it ;  the  child,  seized  with  the  genuine  play-mood, 
dreams  its  doll  into  a  living  child,  or  living  adult. 
How  oddly  the  player's  faith  goes  on  living  side  by 
side  with  a  measure  of  doubt  is  illustrated  in  the  fol- 
lowing story.  A  little  girl  begged  her  mother  not  to 
make  remarks  about  her  doll  in  her  (the  doll's)  pres- 
ence, as  she  had  been  trying  all  her  life  to  keep  that 
doll  from  knowing  that  she  was  not  alive.^ 

The  treating  of  the  doll  and  images  of  animals,  such 
as  the  wooden  or  india-rubber  horse,  as  living  things  is 
the  outcome  of  the  play-impulse.  All  the  imaginative 
play  of  children  seems,  so  far  as  we  can  und  erstand  it,  to 
have  about  it  something  of  illusion.  This  fact  of  the 
full  sincere  acceptance  of  the  play-world  as  for  the 
moment  the  real  one,  is  illustrated  in  the  child's  jealous 
insistence  that  everything  shall  for  the  time  pass  over 
from  the  every-day  world  into  the  new  one.     "  About 

^  From  an  article  on  "The  Philosophy  of  Dolls,'"'  Chambers* 
journal,  1881. 


The  Enchantment  of  Play.  23 

the  age  of  four,"  writes  M.  Egger  of  his  boys,  "  Felix 
is  playing  at  being  coachman  ;  Emile  happens  to  return 
home  at  the  moment.  In  announcing  his  brother, 
Felix  does  not  say,  'Emile  is  come;'  he  says,  'The 
brother  of  the  coachman  is  come '."  It  is  illustrated 
further  in  the  keen  resentment  of  any  act  on  the  part 
of  the  mother  or  other  person  which  seems  to  contra- 
dict the  facts  of  the  new  world.  A  boy  of  two  who 
was  playing  one  morning  in  his  mother's  bed  at  drink- 
ing up  pussy's  milk  from  an  imaginary  saucer  on  the 
pillow,  said  a  little  crossly  to  his  mother,  who  was 
getting  into  bed  after  fetching  his  toys  :  "  Don't  lie  on 
de  saucer,  mammy  !  "  The  pain  inflicted  on  the  little 
player  by  such  a  contradictory  action  is  sometimes  in- 
tense. A  little  girl  of  four  was  playing  "  shops  "  with 
her  younger  sister.  "  The  elder  one  (writes  the 
mother)  was  shopman  at  the  time  I  came  into  her 
room  and  kissed  her.  She  broke  out  into  piteous 
sobs,  I  could  not  understand  why.  At  last  she  sobbed 
out:  *  Mother,  you  never  kiss  the  man  in  the  shop'. 
I  had  with  my  kiss  quite  spoilt  her  illusion." 

But  there  is  still  another,  and  some  will  think  a 
more  conclusive  way  of  satisfying  ourselves  of  the 
reality  of  the  play-illusion.  The  child  finds  himself 
confronted  by  the  unbeliever  who  questions  what  he 
says  about  the  dolFs  crying  and  so  forth,  and  in  this 
case  he  will  often  stoutly  defend  his  creed.  "Dis- 
cussions with  sceptical  brothers  (writes  Dr.  Stanley 
Hall),  who  assert  that  the  doll  is  nothing  but  wood, 
rubber,  wax,  etc.,  are  often  met  with  a  resentment  as 
keen  as  that  vented  upon  missionaries  who  declare 
that  idols  are  but  stocks  and  stones."  It  is  the  same 
with  the  toy-horse.     "  When  (writes  a  mother  of  her 


24  Children's  Ways. 

boy)  he  was  just  over  two  years  old  L.  began  to  speak 
of  a  favourite  wooden  horse  (Dobbin)  as  if  it  were  a 
real  living  creature.  '  No  tarpenter  (carpenter)  made 
Dobbin,'  he  would  say,  'he  is  not  wooden  but  kin 
(skin)  and  bones  and  Dod  (God)  made  him.'  If  any 
one  said  '  it '  in  speaking  of  the  horse  his  wrath  was 
instantly  aroused,  and  he  would  shout  indignantly : 
'  It!  You  mut'ent  tay  it,  you  mut  tay  he. ' " 

While  play  in  its  absorbing  moments,  and  even 
afterwards,  may  thus  produce  a  genuine  illusion,  the 
state  of  perfect  realisation  is  of  course  apt  to  be  broken 
by  intervals  of  scepticism.  This  has  already  been 
illustrated  in  the  case  of  the  doll.  The  same  little 
boy  that  played  with  the  imaginary  mice  was  sitting 
on  his  stool  pretending  to  smoke  like  his  grandpapa 
out  of  a  bit  of  bent  cardboard.  Suddenly  his  face 
clouded  over  ;  he  stroked  his  chin,  and  remarked  in 
a  disappointed  tone,  "  I  have  not  got  any  whiskers  ". 
The  dream  of  full  manhood  was  here  rudely  dispelled 
by  a  recall  to  reality. 

A  measure  of  the  same  fanciful  transformation  of 
things  that  has  been  illustrated  in  make-believe  play, 
a  measure,  too,  of  the  illusion  which  frequently  ac- 
companies it,  enters,  I  believe,  into  all  children's  pas- 
times. Whence  comes  the  perennial  charm,  the  un- 
dying popularity,  of  the  hoop?  Is  not  the  interest 
here  due  to  the  circumstance  that  the  child  controls  a 
thing  which  in  the  freedom  of  its  movements  suggests 
that  it  has  a  will  of  its  own  ?  This  seems  borne  out 
by  the  following  story.  A  little  girl  of  five  once 
stopped  trundling  her  hoop  and  said  to  her  mother  she 
thought  that  her  hoop  must  be  alive,  because  "  it  is  so 
sensible ;  it  goes  where  I  want  it  to ".     Perhaps  the 


The  Enchantment  of  Play.  25 

same  thing  may  be  said  of  other  toys,  as  the  kite  and 
the  sailing  boat. 

Serious  Side  of  Play. 

I  have  here  treated  the  whole  realm  of  childish 
fancy  as  one  of  play,  as  one  in  which  happy  child- 
hood finds  its  own  sunny  world.  Yet  it  is  clear  that 
this  is  after  all  only  one  side  of  children's  dream- 
world. Like  our  own  world  it  has  its  climates,  and  if 
fancy  is  often  frolicsome  and  games  deliciously  sweet, 
they  sometimes  become  serious  to  the  point  of  a  quite 
dreadful  solemnity. 

That  children's  imagination  is  wont  to  hover,  with 
something  of  the  fascination  of  the  moth,  on  the  con- 
fines of  the  fearful,  is  known  to  us  all.  Some  children, 
no  doubt,  have  much  more  of  the  passion  for  the 
gruesome  and  blood-curdling  than  others,  since  tem- 
perament counts  for  much  here ;  yet  it  is  pretty  safe 
to  say  that  most  know  something  of  this  horrible 
fascination.  Dreams,  whether  of  the  night  or  of  the 
day,  are  not  always  of  beautiful  fairies  and  the  like. 
Weird,  awful-looking  figures  have  a  way  of  pushing 
themselves  into  the  front  of  the  scene.  Especially 
when  the  "  tone  "  of  the  frail  young  nerves  runs  down 
from  poor  health  do  these  alarming  shapes  appear, 
and  acquire  a  mighty  hold  on  the  child's  imagina- 
tion. Of  the  timidity  of  the  early  years  of  life  I  shall 
have  more  to  say  by-and-by.  Here  I  want  to  bring 
out  how  the  very  vividness  of  children's  images  ex- 
poses them  to  what  is  sometimes  at  least  their  worst 
form  of  suffering. 

A  child,  at  once  sensitive  and  imaginative,  fre- 
quently passes  into  a  state  of  half  hallucination  in 

3 


2  6  Children's  Ways. 

which  the  products  of  fancy  take  on  visible  reality. 
George  Sand,  in  her  delightful  reminiscences  of  child- 
hood, relates  more  than  one  of  these  terrible  prostrating 
hallucinations  of  the  early  years.^ 
^  I  We  see  the  same  gloomy  turn  of  the  young  imagi- 
Tnation  in  the  readiness  with  which  children  accept 
superstitions  about  ghosts,  witches,  and  so  forth. 
Those  who  are  brought  up  in  the  country  in  contact 
with  the  superstitious  beliefs  of  the  peasant  appear  to 
imbibe  them  with  great  energy.  This  is  true  of 
George  Sand,  who  gives  us  an  interesting  account  of 
the  legends  of  the  French  peasants,  with  whom  when 
a  little  girl  she  was  allowed  to  associate.  American 
children,  especially  those  who  come  under  the  influence 
of  the  beliefs  of  the  negro  and  of  the  Indian,  may,  as 
that  delightful  book,  Tom  Sawyer,  tells  us,  become 
quite  experts  in  folk-lore.  Even  in  England  and 
among  well-to-do  people  children  will  show  an  alarm- 
ing facility  in  adopting  the  superstitious  ideas  of  the 
servants. 

Much  the  same  thing  shows  itself  in  children's 
romancings  and  in  their  preferences  in  the  matter  of 
stories.  So  far  from  these  being  always  bright  and 
amusing,  they  frequently  show  a  very  decided  tinge  of 
blackness.  The  young  imagination  seems  to  be  especi- 
ally plastic  under  the  touch  of  the  gruesome.  It  loves  to 
be  roused  to  its  highest  pitch  of  activity  by  the  presenta- 
tion of  something  fearsome,  something  which  sends  a 
wild  tremor  through  the  nerves.  And  even  when  the 
story  is  free  from  this  touch  of  the  dreadful  it  takes 

'  See  my  account  of  George  Sand's  childhood,  in  Studies  of  Child- 
hood, chap.  xii. 


The  Enchantment  of  Play.  27 

on  seriousness  by  reason  of  the  earnestness  which  the 
child's  mind  brings  to  it. 

Coming  now  to  active  play,  we  find  here,  too,  in  the 
region  which  seems  to  owe  its  very  existence  to  the 
childish  instinct  of  enjoyment,  traces  of  the  same 
seriousness.  For  most  children,  one  suspects,  play 
would  become  a  tame  thing  were  there  not  the  fear- 
ful to  conjure  with.  The  favourite  play-haunts,  the 
dark  corners  under  the  table,  behind  the  curtains, 
and  so  forth,  show  what  a  vital  element  of  play  is 
supplied  by  the  excitement  of  the  state  of  half- 
dread.  It  is  in  the  games  which  set  the  young 
nerves  gently  shaking,  when  a  robber  has  to  be 
met  or  a  giant  attacked  in  his  cave,  that  one  sees 
best,  I  think,  how  terribly  earnest  children's  play 
may  become. 

Even  where  play  has  in  it  nothing  alarming  it  is 
apt  to  take  on  a  serious  aspect.  This  has  been  illus- 
trated in  what  has  been  said  about  the  doll  and  other 
play-illusions.  Most  of  children's  play  is  imitative  of 
the  serious  actions  of  grown-up  folk.  In  nursing  her 
doll  the  little  girl  is  taking  to  her  domestic  duties  in 
the  most  serious  of  moods  ;  similarly  when  the  little 
boy  assumes  the  responsibilities  of  coachman  or  other 
useful  functionary.  The  imitative  impulse  of  child- 
hood is  wont  in  these  cases  to  follow  out  the  correct 
and  prescribed  order  with  punctilious  exactness.  The 
doll  must  be  dressed,  fed,  put  to  bed,  and  so  forth, 
with  the  regularity  that  obtains  in  the  child's  own  life  ; 
the  coachman  must  hold  the  whip,  urge  on  the  horses, 
or  stop  them  in  the  proper  orthodox  manner.  And 
the  same  fidelity  to  model  and  prescription  shows 
itself  in  those  games  which  reproduce  the  page  of 


28  Children's  Ways. 

fiction.  Here  again  Tom  Sawyer  is  an  excellent 
example.  The  way  in  which  that  leader  of  boys  lays 
down  the  law  to  Huckleberry  Finn  when  they  play 
at  pirates  or  at  Robin  Hood  and  his  merry  men 
illustrates  forcibly  this  serious  aspect  of  play. 


PART    II. 

AT  WORK. 
CHAPTER  III. 

ATTACKING  OUR  LANGUAGE. 

No  part  of  the  life  of  a  child  appeals  to  us  more 
powerfully  perhaps  than  the  first  use  of  our  language. 
The  small  person's  first  efforts  in  linguistics  win  us 
by  a  certain  graciousness,  by  the  friendly  impulse  they 
disclose  to  get  mentally  near  us,  to  enter  into  the  full 
fruition  of  human  intercourse.  The  difficulties,  too, 
which  we  manage  to  lay  upon  the  young  learner  of 
our  tongue,  and  the  way  in  which  he  grapples  with 
these,  lend  a  peculiar  interest,  half  pathetic,  half 
humorous,  to  this  field  of  infantile  activity.  A  child 
first  begins  to  work  in  downright  earnest  when  he 
tries  to  master  these  difficulties. 

As  we  are  here  studying  the  child  at  an  age  when 
he  has  acquired  a  certain  hold  on  human  speech,  I 
shall  make  no  attempt  to  describe  the  babbling  of  the 
first  months  which  precedes  true  speech.  For  the 
same  reason  I  shall  have  to  pass  by  the  interesting 
beginnings  of  sign-making,  and  shall  only  just  touch 
the  first  stages  of  articulate  performance.  All  this 
is,    I    think,   deeply   interesting,   but    it    cannot    be 


30  Children's  Ways. 

adequately  dealt  with  here,  and    I   have  fully  dealt 
with  it  in  my  larger  work. 

The  first  difficulty  which  our  little  linguist  has  to 
encounter  is  the  mechanical  one  of  reproducing,  with 
a  recognisable  measure  of  approximation,  our  verbal 
sounds.  What  a  very  rough  approximation  it  is  at 
first,  all  mothers  know.  When,  for  example,  a  child 
expects  you  to  translate  his  sound  "koppa"  into 
"  Tommy,"  or  "  pots  "  into  "  hippopotamus,"  it  will  be 
acknowledged  that  he  is  making  heavy  demands. 
Yet  though  he  causes  us  difficulties  in  this  way  he 
does  so  because  he  finds  himself  in  difficulties.  His 
articulatory  organ  cannot  master  the  terrible  words 
we  put  in  his  way,  and  he  is  driven  to  these  short  cuts 
and  other  make-shifts. 

The  Namer  of  Things. 

Leaving  now  the  problem  of  getting  over  the 
mechanical  difficulties  of  our  speech,  let  us  see  what 
the  little  explorer  has  to  do  when  trying  to  use  verbal 
sounds  with  their  right  meanings.  Here,  too,  we  shall 
find  that  huge  difficulties  beset  his  path,  and  that  his 
arrival  at  the  goal  proves  him  to  have  been  in  his 
way  as  valiant  and  hard-working  as  an  African  ex- 
plorer. 

One  feature  of  the  early  tussle  with  our  language  is 
curious  and  often  quaintly  pretty.  Having  at  first 
but  few  names,  the  little  experimenter  makes  the 
most  of  these  by  extending  them  in  new  and  surpris- 
ing directions.  The  extension  of  names  to  new  objects 
on  the  ground  of  some  perceived  likeness  has  been 
touched  on  above  (p.  3)  ;  and  many  other  examples 


Attacking  our  Language.  31 

might  be  given.  Thus  when  one  child  first  saw  a 
star  and  wanted  to  name  it  he  called  it,  as  if  by  a 
poetic  metaphor,  an  "eye".  In  like  manner  the 
name  "  pin "  was  extended  by  another  child  to  a 
cruml^  just  picked  up,  a  fly,  and  a  caterpillar,  and 
seemed  to  mean  something  little  to  be  taken  between 
the  fingers.  The  same  child  used  the  sound  "at" 
(hat)  for  anything  put  on  the  head,  including  a  hair- 
brush. Similarly  children  often  extend  the  names 
"  Mamma,  baby  "  to  express  any  contrast  of  size,  as 
when  a  small  coin  was  called  by  an  American  child  a 
*' baby  dollar". 

In  this  extension  of  language  by  the  child  we  find 
not  merely  a  tendency  to  move  along  lines  of  analogy, 
as  in  the  above  instances,  but  to  go  from  a  thing  to 
its  accompaniments  by  way  of  what  the  psycholo- 
gist calls  association.  This  is  illustrated  by  the  case 
of  Darwin's  grandchild,  who  after  learning  to  use 
the  common  children's  name  for  duck,  "quack,"  pro- 
ceeded to  call  a  sheet  of  water  "quack".  In  like 
manner  a  little  girl  called  the  gas  lamp  "  pop  "  from 
the  sound  produced  when  lighting  it,  and  then  carried 
over  the  name  "  pop"  to  the  stool  on  which  the  maid 
stood  when  proceeding  to  light  it 

There  is  another  curious  way  in  which  children  are 
driven  by  the  slenderness  of  their  verbal  resources  to 
"extend"  the  names  they  learn.  They  will  often 
employ  a  word  which  indicates  some  relation  to  ex- 
press what  may  be  called  the  inverted  relation.  For 
example,  like  the  unschooled  yokel  they  will  some- 
times make  the  word  "learn"  do  duty  for  "teach" 
also.  In  one  case  "  spend "  was  made  to  express 
**  cost ".     It  was  a  somewhat  similar  inversion  when 


32  Children's  Ways. 

a  little  girl  called  her  parasol  blown  about  by  the 
wind  "a  windy  parasol,"  and  a  stone  that  made  her 
hand  sore  "  a  very  sore  stone  ". 

Not  only  do  the  small  experimenters  thus  stretch 
the  application  of  their  words  beyond  our  conven- 
tional limitations,  they  are  often  daring  enough  when 
their  stock  fails  them  to  invent  new  names.  Some- 
times this  is  done  by  framing  a  new  composite  name 
out  of  familiar  ones.  One  child,  for  example,  pos- 
sessing the  word  steam-ship  and  wanting  the  name 
sailing-ship,  cleverly  hit  upon  the  composite  form 
"wind-ship".  One  little  girl,  when  only  a  year  and 
nine  months  old,  showed  quite  a  passion  for  classing 
objects  by  help  of  such  compound  names,  arranging 
the  rooms,  for  example,  into  "  morner-room,"  "  dinner- 
room  "  (she  was  fond  of  adding  "er"  at  this  time)  and 
"  nursery-room  ".  Savages  do  much  the  same  kind  of 
thing,  as  when  the  Aztecs  called  a  boat  a  "water-house". 

It  is  no  less  bold  a  feat  when  the  hard-pressed 
tyro  in  speechland  frames  a  new  word  on  the  model 
of  other  words  which  he  already  knows.  The  results 
are  often  quaint  enough.  One  small  boy  talked  of 
the  "  rainer,"  the  fairy  who  makes  rain,  and  another 
little  boy  dubbed  a  teacher  the  "  lessoner ".  Two 
children  invented  the  quaint  substantive  ''thinks"  for 
"  thoughts,"  and  another  child  used  the  form  "digs  "  for 
holes  dug  in  the  ground.  Other  droll  inventions 
occur,  as  when  one  small  person  asked  to  see  another 
worm  "  deading,"  and  neatly  expressed  the  act  of 
undoing  a  parcel  by  the  form  "  unparcel  ";  and  when 
another  child  spoke  of  his  metal  toy  being  "  unhotted," 
lacking  our  word  cooled,  and  asked,  "  Can't  I  be 
sorried?"  for  "Can't  I  be  forgiven?" 


Attacking  our  Language.  33 

Just  as  children  invent  new  general  names,  so  they 
now  and  again  invent  "proper"  names  in  order  to 
mark  off  one  person  or  thing  from  another  of  the 
same  kind.  Thus  a  German  professor  tells  us  that 
his  grand-niece  introduced  her  new  nurse,  who  had 
the  same  name,  "  Mary,"  as  her  old  one,  as  "  Evening 
Mary,"  because  she  had  arrived  in  the  evening. 

Of  course  children's  experiments  in  language  are 
not  always  so  neat  as  this.  They  are  sometimes 
misled  by  false  analogies  into  the  formation  of  such 
clumsy  words  as  "  sorrified  "  for  "sorry,"  and  "mag- 
nicious  "  for  "  magnificent ". 

The  Sentence-builder. 

It  is  an  interesting  moment  when  the  young  linguist 
tries  his  hand  at  putting  words  together  in  sentences. 
As  is  pretty  well  known,  a  child  has  for  some  time  to 
try  to  make  known  his  thoughts  and  wishes  by  single 
vocables,  such  as  "  mamma,"  "  milk,"  "  puss,"  "  up," 
and  so  forth.  Each  of  these  words  serves  in  the  first 
baby  language  for  a  variety  of  sentences.  Thus 
"Puss!"  means  sometimes  "Puss  is  doing  something," 
at  other  times  "  I  want  puss,"  and  so  forth.  But 
somewhere  about  the  age  of  one  year  nine  months 
the  child  makes  bold  to  essay  a  more  explicit  and 
definite  form  of  statement. 

The  construction  of  sentences  proceeds  in  a  cautious 
manner.  At  first  the  structure  is  of  the  simplest, 
two  words  being  placed  one  after  the  other,  in  what 
is  called  apposition,  as  in  the  couple,  "  Big  bir  "  (big 
bird),  "  Papa  no  "  (papa's  nose),  and  the  like. 

Later  on  longer  sentences  are  attempted  of  a  similar 


34  Children's  Ways. 

pattern  ;  and  it  is  truly  wonderful  how  much  the  child 
manages  to  express  in  this  rude  fashion  without  any  aid 
from  those  valuable  auxiliaries,  prepositions,  and  the 
like.  For  example,  one  boy  when  in  his  twentieth 
month  gave  this  elaborate  order  to  his  father,  "  Dada 
toe  toe  ba,"  that  is,  "Dada  is  to  go  and  put  his  toes 
in  the  bath  ". 

Quaint  inversions  of  our  order  not  infrequently 
occur  in  this  early  sentence-making.  Thus  one  child 
used  the  form,  "  Out-pull-baby  'pecs,"  meaning  in  our 
language,  "Baby  pulls  (or  will  pull)  out  the  spectacles". 
Sometimes  the  order  reminds  us  still  more  closely  of 
the  idiom  of  foreign  languages,  as  when  a  little  girl  said: 
"  How  Babba  (baby,  i.e.,  herself)  docs  feed  nicely ! " 

Another  curious  feature  of  children's  first  style  of 
composition  is  the  fondness  for  antithesis.  A  little 
boy  used  when  wishing  to  express  his  approval  of 
something,  say  a  dog,  to  use  the  form,  "  This  a  nice 
bow-wow,  not  nasty  bow-bow".  Similarly  a  little 
girl  said,  "  Boo  (the  name  of  her  cat)  dot  (got)  tail ; 
poor  Babba  (baby)  dot  no  tail,"  proceeding  to  search 
for  a  tail  under  her  skirts. 

In  the  first  attempts  to  fit  our  words  together 
dreadful  slips  are  apt  to  occur.  The  way  in  which 
children  are  wont  to  violate  the  rules  of  grammar 
when  using  verbs,  as  in  saying  "eated"  for  "ate," 
"scram  "  for  "  screamed,'  "  be'd  "  for  "was,"  and  so 
on,  is  well  known,  and  there  are  many  excuses  to  be 
found  for  these  very  natural  errors. 

Particularly  instructive  are  the  odd  confusions 
which  children  are  apt  to  fall  into  when  they  come 
to  use  the  pronouns,  and  more  particularly  "  I," 
•*me".     Many  a  child  begins  by  using  "I"  and  "you" 


Attacking  our  Language.  35 

with  mechanical  imitation  of  others,  meaning  by 
"  you "  his  own  person,  which  is,  of  course,  called 
"you"  by  others  when  addressing  him.  The  forms 
"  I,"  "  me  "  and  "  my  "  are  apt  to  be  hopelessly  mixed 
up,  as  in  saying  "me  go"  and  "my  go"  for  "I 
go,"  "  me  book  "  for  "  my  book,"  and  so  forth.  One 
little  boy  used  the  form  "  I  am  "  for  "  I,"  saying,  for 
example,  "  I  am  don't  want  to ".  A  little  German 
girl  had  an  odd  way  of  splitting  up  herself  into  two 
persons,  saying,  for  example,  "  She  has  made  me 
wet,"  meaning  that  she  had  made  herself  wet. 

Throughout  this  work  of  mastering  our  language  a 
child  is  wont  to  eke  out  his  deficiencies  by  bold 
strokes  of  originality.  When,  for  example,  a  little  girl 
towards  the  end  of  the  second  year,  after  being 
jumped  by  her  father,  wants  him  to  jump  her  mother 
also,  says,  in  default  of  the  word  "jump,"  "Make 
mamma  high ".  Robert  Hamerling,  the  Austrian 
poet,  when  a  child,  being  told  by  his  sick  mother  that 
he  had  not  said  something  she  wished  him  to  say, 
answered,  "  I  said  it,  but  you  didn't  hear,  you  are 
poorly,  and  so  blind  in  the  ear".  Quite  pretty 
metaphors  are  sometimes  hit  upon,  as  when  a  little 
boy  of  two  seeing  his  father  putting  a  piece  of  wood 
on  the  fire  said,  "  Flame  going  to  eat  it ".  A  boy  of 
twenty-seven  months  ingeniously  said,  "  It  rains  off," 
for  "The  rain  has  left  off".  Once  a  girl  about  the 
same  age  as  the  boy  hit  on  the  idiom,  "  No  two  'tatoes 
left,"  for  "  Only  one  potato  is  left ".  Pretty  construc- 
tions sometimes  appear  in  these  make-shifts,  as  when 
a  little  girl  of  whom  Mrs.  Meynell  tells,  wishing  to 
know  how  far  she  might  go  in  spending  money  on 
fruit,  asked,  "  What  mustn't  it  be  more  than  ?  " 


36  Children's  Ways, 

The  Interpreter  of  Words. 

There  is  one  part  of  this  task  of  mastering  our 
lang-uage  which  deserves  especial  notice,  viz.,  the 
puzzling  out  of  the  meanings  we  put,  or  try  to  put, 
into  our  words. 

Many  good  stories  of  children  show  that  they  have 
a  way  of  sadly  misunderstanding  our  words.  This 
arises  often  from  the  ignorance  of  the  child  and  the 
narrowness  of  his  experience,  as  when  a  Sunday 
school  scholar  understood  the  story  of  the  good 
Samaritan  to  mean  that  a  gentleman  came  and 
poured  some  paraffin  (z>.,  oil)  over  the  poor  man. 
By  a  child's  mind  what  we  call  accidentals  often 
get  taken  to  be  the  real  meaning.  A  boy  and  a 
girl,  twins,  had  been  dressed  alike.  Later  on  the 
boy  was  put  into  a  "suit".  A  lady  asked  the  girl 
about  this  time  whether  they  were  not  the  twins,  when 
she  replied,  "  No,  we  used  to  be ".  "  Twin  "  was 
inseparably  associated  in  her  mind  with  the  similarity 
in  dress. 

It  should  be  remembered,  too,  that  we  greatly  add  to 
the  difficulties  of  the  small  student  of  our  language 
by  reason  of  the  ambiguities  of  our  expressions,  and 
of  our  short  and  elliptical  modes  of  speaking.  It 
was  a  quite  natural  misconception  when  an  Ameri- 
can child,  noting  that  children  were  "half  price"  at 
a  certain  show,  wanted  his  mother  to  get  a  baby 
now  that  they  were  cheap.  Many  another  child 
besides  Jean  Ingelow  has  been  saddened  at  being 
told  by  her  father  or  other  grown-up  who  was  dancing 
her  on  his  knee  that  he  must  put  her  down  as  he 
*'  had  a  bone  in  his  leg ".     Much  misapprehension 


Attacking  our  Language.  37 

arises,  too  from  our  figurative  use  of  language,  which 
the  little  listener  is  apt  to  interpret  in  a  very  literal 
way,  as  when  a  small  boy  indignantly  resented  the 
statement  of  his  mother  who  was  driving  him  behind 
a  rather  skittish  pony,  "  Pony  has  lost  his  head  ". 

Children  are  desirous  of  understanding  us  and  make 
brave  efforts  to  put  meanings  into  our  words,  some- 
times falling  comically  short  of  the  mark.  A  little 
fellow  of  two  who  had  been  called  "  fat "  by  his  nurse 
when  given  his  bath,  afterwards  proceeded  to  call  his 
father  "  fat "  when  he  saw  him  taking  his  bath.  "  Fat " 
had  by  a  natural  misconception  taken  on  the  meaning 
of  "  naked  ".  It  was  a  simple  movement  of  childish 
thought  when  a  little  school-girl  answered  the  question 
of  the  Inspector,  "  What  is  an  average  ? "  by  saying, 
'•  What  the  hen  lays  eggs  on  ".  She  had  heard  her 
mother  say,  "The  hen  lays  so  many  eggs  'on  the 
average'  every  week,"  and  had  no  doubt  imagined  a 
little  myth  about  this  average. 

It  is  the  same  with  what  is  read  to  them.  Where 
they  do  not  recognise  a  meaning  they  invent  one,  or 
if  necessary  substitute  an  intelligible  word  for  an  un- 
intelligible one.  Young  Hermiston  in  R.  L.  Steven- 
son's last  story  naturally  enough  said  in  speaking  of 
his  father,  the  "  hanging  judge,"  "  It  were  better  for 
that  man  if  a  milestone  were  bound  about  his  neck ". 
Similarly  they  will  invert  the  relations  of  words  in 
order  to  arrive  at  something  like  a  meaning.  Mr. 
Canton  relates  in  his  pretty  sketch  of  a  child,  The 
Invisible  Playmate,  that  his  little  heroine,  who  knew 
the  lines  in  Struwwelpeter — 

The  doctor  came  and  shook  his  head. 
And  gave  him  nasty  physic  too — 


38  Children's  Ways. 

was  told  that  she  would  catch  a  cold,  and  that  she  at 
once  replied,  "  And  will  the  doctor  come  and  shook 
my  head  ?  "  It  was  so  much  more  natural  to  suppose 
that  when  the  doctor  came  and  did  something  this 
was  carried  out  on  the  person  of  the  patient. 

There  is  something  of  this  same  impatience  of 
meaningless  sayings,  of  the  same  keen  desire  to  im- 
port a  meaning  into  strange  words,  in  children's 
"  word-play,"  as  we  call  it.  For  example,  a  little  boy 
about  four  years  old  heard  his  mother  speak  of  nurse's 
neuralgia,  from  which  she  had  been  suffering  for  some 
time.  He  thereupon  exclaimed,  "  I  don't  think  it's 
new  ralgia,  I  call  it  old  ralgia".  Was  this  playful 
punning  or  a  half-serious  attempt  to  correct  a  mis- 
statement? A  child  called  his  doll  "Shakespeare" 
because  its  spear-like  legs  could  be  shaken.  We 
know  that  adults  sometimes  do  the  same  kind  ot 
thing,  as  a  cabman  I  once  overheard  speaking  to 
somebody  about  putting  down  "  «.f/^phalt ".  We  all 
like  to  feel  at  home  with  words,  and  if  they  look 
dreadfully  strange  we  do  our  best  to  give  them  a  look 
of  old  acquaintance. 

It  should  be  added  that  children,  though  they  eke 
out  their  deficiencies  by  inventing  new  verbal  forms 
and  putting  new  meanings  into  our  words,  have  on 
the  whole  a  vast  respect  for  words.  This  is  seen  in 
their  way  of  stickling  for  accuracy  when  others  re- 
peat familiar  word-forms.  The  zeal  of  a  child  in 
correcting  the  language  not  only  of  other  children, 
but  of  grown-ups,  and  the  comical  errors  he  will  now 
and  again  fall  into  in  exercising  his  corrective  func- 
tion, are  well  known  to  parents.  Sometimes  he  shows 
himself  the  most  absurd  of  pedants.     "  Shall  I  read 


Attacking  our  Language.  39 

to  you  out  of  this  book,  baby  ? "  asked  a  mother  of 
her  boy,  about  two  and  a  half  years  old.  "  No,"  re- 
plied the  infant,  "  not  out  of  dot  book,  but  somepy  in- 
side of  it."  The  same  little  stickler  for  verbal  accuracy, 
when  his  nurse  asked  him,  "  Are  you  going  to  build 
your  bricks,  baby  ? "  replied  solemnly,  "  We  don't 
build  bricks,  we  make  them  and  then  build  with 
them ".  Yet  such  disagreeable  pedantry  shows  how 
conscientiously  the  small  curly  head  is  trying  to  bring 
clearness  and  order  into  the  dark  tangle  of  our  speech, 
and  it  ought  not  to  be  treated  harshly. 


CHAPTER  IV. 

THE   SERIOUS  SEARCHER. 

In  a  former  chapter  we  dealt  with  a  child's  mind  as  a 
harbourer  of  fancies,  as  subject  to  the  illusive  spell  of 
its  bright  imagery.  Yet  with  this  play  of  fancy  there 
goes  a  respectable  quantity  of  serious  inquiry  into  the 
things  of  the  real  world.  This  is  true,  I  believe,  even 
of  highly  imaginative  children,  who  now  and  again 
come  down  from  their  fancy-created  world  and  regard 
the  solid  matter-of-fact  one  at  their  feet  with  shrewdly 
scrutinising  eyes.  For  children,  like  some  of  those 
patients  of  whom  the  hypnotist  tells  us,  live  alter- 
nately two  lives. 

The  child  not  only  scans  his  surroundings,  he 
begins  to  reflect  on  what  he  observes,  and  does  his 
best  to  understand  the  puzzling  scene  which  meets 
his  eyes.  And  all  this  gives  seriousness,  a  deep  and 
admirable  seriousness,  to  his  attitude ;  so  that  one 
may  forgive  the  touch  of  exaggeration  when  Mr.  Bret 
Harte  writes :  "  All  those  who  have  made  a  loving 
study  of  the  young  human  animal  will,  I  think,  ad- 
mit that  its  dominant  expression  is  gravity  and  not 
playfulness  ".  We  may  now  turn  to  this  graver  side 
of  the  young  intelligence. 

The  Thoughtful  Observer, 
This  serious  examination  of  things  begins  early. 


The  Serious  Searcher.  4 1 

Most  of  us  have  been  subjected  to  the  searching  gaze 
of  an  infant's  eyes  when  we  first  made  it  overtures  of 
friendship.  How  much  this  fixed  gaze  of  a  child  of 
six  months  takes  in  nobody  can  say. 

What  we  find  when  the  child  grows  and  can  give 
an  account  of  his  observations  is  that,  while  often 
surprisingly  minute  in  particular  directions,  they  are 
narrowly  confined.  Thus  a  child  will  sometimes  be 
so  impressed  with  the  colour  of  an  object  as  almost 
to  ignore  its  form.  A  little  girl  of  eighteen  months, 
who  knew  lambs  and  called  them  "  lammies ,"  on 
seeing  two  black  ones  in  a  field  among  some  white 
ones  called  out,  "  Eh  !  doggie,  doggie !  "  The  like- 
ness of  colour  to  the  black  dog  overpowered  the  like- 
ness in  form  to  the  other  lambs  close  by.  We  shall 
find  further  examples  of  this  one-sided  observation 
when  we  come  to  consider  children's  drawings. 

The  pressure  of  practical  needs  tends,  however,  to 
develop  a  fuller  examination  of  objects.  A  lamb  and 
a  dog,  for  example,  have  to  be  distinguished  by  a 
number  of  marks  in  which  the  supremely  interesting 
detail  of  colour  holds  a  quite  subordinate  place.  In- 
dividual things,  too,  have  to  be  more  carefully  dis- 
tinguished, if  only  for  the  purpose  of  drawing  the 
line  between  what  is  "mine"  and  "not  mine,"  for 
example,  spoons  and  picture-books.  The  recognition 
of  the  mother,  say,  exacts  this  fuller  inspection,  for 
she  cannot  always  be  recognised  by  her  height  alone, 
for  example,  when  she  is  sitting,  nor  by  her  hair  alone, 
as  when  she  has  her  hat  on,  so  that  a  groUp  of  distinc- 
tive features  has  to  be  seized. 

When  once  the  eye  has  begun  to  note  differences 
it  makes  rapid  progress.  This  is  particularly  true 
4 


42  Children's  Ways. 

where  the  development  of  a  special  interest  leads  to 
a  habit  of  concentration  on  a  particular  kind  of  object 
Thus  little  boys  when  the  "railway  interest"  seizes 
them  are  apt  to  be  finely  observant  of  the  differences 
between  this  and  that  engine  and  so  forth.  A  boy 
aged  two  years  and  eleven  months,  after  travelling 
over  two  railways,  asked  his  mother  if  she  had  noticed 
the  difference  in  the  make  of  the  rails  on  the  two 
lines.  Of  course  she  had  not,  though  she  afterwards 
ascertained  that  there  was  a  slight  difference  which 
the  boy's  keener  eyes  had  detected. 

The  fineness  of  children's  distinguishing  observation 
is  well  illustrated  in  their  recognition  of  small  drawings 
and  photographs,  as  when  one  child  of  two  instantly 
picked  out  the  likeness  of  his  father  from  a  small  carte 
de  visite  group. 

In  truth,  children's  observation,  when  close  and 
prolonged,  as  it  is  apt  to  be  under  the  stimulus  of  a 
really  powerful  interest,  is  often  surprisingly  full  as 
well  as  exact.  The  boy,  John  Ruskin,  could  look 
for  hours  together  at  flowing  water,  noting  all  its 
subtle  changes.  Another  little  boy,  when  three 
and  a  half  years  old,  received  a  picture-book.  The 
Railway  Train,  and  inspected  the  drawings  almost 
uninterruptedly  for  a  week,  retaining  the  treasure 
even  at  meals.  "  At  the  end  of  this  time  (writes  his 
mother)  he  had  grasped  the  smallest  detail  in  every 
picture." 

Along  with  this  serious  work  of  observing  things 
there  often  goes  a  particularly  bright  and  exact  recol- 
lection of  them  and  their  names.  Pleats  of  memory 
in  the  first  three  years  are,  I  suspect,  a  common 
theme  of  discourse  among  admiring  mothers.     Here 


The  Serious  Searcher.  43 

is  a  sample  of  many  stories  sent  me.  A  little  girl 
only  nine  months  old  when  taken  out  for  a  walk  was 
shown  some  lambs  at  the  gate  of  a  field.  On  being 
taken  the  same  road  three  weeks  later  she  surprised 
her  mother  by  calling  out  just  before  arriving  at  the 
gate,  "  Baa,  baa!"  Later  on  children  will  remember 
through  much  longer  intervals.  A  little  boy  of  two 
years  on  seeing  a  girl  cousin  who  lived  in  the  country 
where  he  had  visited  five  months  before,  at  once  asked 
whether  her  dog  "  Bruce  "  barked.  Another  boy  aged 
two  years  and  ten  months  on  revisiting  his  mother's 
paternal  home  in  Italy  after  four  or  five  months  re- 
membered small  details,  e.g.,  how  the  grapes  were 
cut,  and  how  the  wine  was  made. 

Nor  does  the  busy  brain  of  the  child  stop  at  observ- 
ing and  recalling  what  lies  about  him.  He  begins  at 
an  early  age  to  compare  this  thing  with  that,  and  to 
note  the  relations  and  connections  of  things,  how  he 
is  almost  as  tall  as  the  table,  for  example,  and  a  good 
deal  taller  than  pussy,  how  he  has  a  spoon  while  his 
elders  have  knives  and  forks,  and  so  forth.  And  all 
the  while  he  is  trying  to  get  at  the  general  rule  or  law 
which  obtains  in  this  and  that  realm  of  things. 

The  first  attempts  of  a  child  to  grasp  the  causal 
connections  of  things  are  apt  to  be  quaint  enough. 
Professor  Preyer  tells  us  that  his  little  boy,  having 
been  told  to  blow  on  his  hand  which  had  been  hurt, 
proceeded  afterwards  when  he  had  struck  his  head 
against  something  "to  blow  of  his  own  accord,  sup- 
posing that  the  blowing  would  have  a  soothing  effect, 
even  when  it  did  not  reach  the  injured  part".^ 

*  The  Development  of  the  Intellect  (Appleton  &  Co.),  p.  155. 


44  Children's  Ways. 

Since  the  little  searcher  in  trying  to  piece  his  facta 
together  in  their  proper  connections  must,  as  all  of  us 
do,  make  use  of  such  experiences  as  he  happens  to 
have,  he  will  pretty  certainly  fall  into  the  error  of 
"  hasty  generalisation,"  as  we  call  it,  taking  things  to 
be  really  connected  which  accidentally  occur  together, 
it  may  be  in  a  single  instance  only.  An  American 
boy  of  ten  who  had  happened  to  have  a  teacher 
who  was  short  and  cross,  and  a  second  who  was  tall 
and  very  kind,  said  to  his  new  teacher,  who  struck 
him  as  short, "I'm  afraid  you'll  make  a  cross  teacher". 
Yet  while  we  smile  at  such  simplicity  ought  we  not 
to  remember  that  older  people,  too,  sometimes  com- 
mit similar  blunders,  and  that  after  all  the  impulse  to 
reason  can  only  work  itself  into  a  good  sound  faculty 
by  risking  such  blunders  ? 

The  Pertinacious  Questioner. 

The  effort  of  the  child  to  understand  the  things 
about  him  grows  noteworthy  somewhere  near  the  end 
of  the  third  year,  and  about  the  same  time  there  comes 
the  questioning  "  mania,"  as  we  are  apt  to  regard  it. 
The  first  question  was  put  in  the  case  of  a  boy  in  the 
twenty-eighth  month,  in  the  case  of  a  girl  in  the 
twenty-third  month.  But  the  true  age  of  inquisitive- 
ness  when  questions  are  fired  oft"  with  wondrous 
rapidity  and  pertinacity  seems  to  be  ushered  in  with 
the  fourth  year. 

A  common  theory  peculiarly  favoured  by  ignorant 
nurses  and  mothers  is  that  children's  questioning  is 
one  of  the  ways  in  which  they  love  to  plague  their 
elders.     We  shall  see  presently  how  much  truth  there 


The  Serious  Searcher.  45 

is  in  this  view.  It  may  be  enough  here  to  say  that  a 
good  deal  of  this  first  questioning  is  something  very 
different  A  child  asks  you  what  this  thing  is  you 
wear  on  your  watch-chain,  why  you  part  your  hair  in 
the  middle,  or  what  not,  because  he  feels  that  he  is 
ignorant,  and  for  the  moment  at  any  rate  he  would 
like  to  get  his  ignorance  removed.  More  than  this, 
his  question  shows  that  he  thinks  you  can  satisfy  his 
curiosity. 

Questioning  may  take  various  directions.  A  good 
deal  of  the  child's  catechising  of  his  long-suffering 
mother  is  prompted  by  a  more  or  less  keen  desire  for 
fact.  The  typical  form  of  this  line  of  questioning  is 
"  What?  "  The  motive  here  is  commonly  the  wish  to 
know  something  which  will  connect  itself  with  and 
complete  a  bit  of  knowledge  already  gained.  "  How 
old  is  Rover  ?  "  "  Where  was  Rover  born  ?  "  "  Who 
was  his  father?"  "What  is  that  dog's  name?" 
**  What  sort  of  hair  had  you  when  you  were  a  little 
girl  ?  "  This  kind  of  questioning  may  spring  out  of 
pure  childish  curiosity,  or  out  of  some  practical  need, 
as  that  of  acting  out  a  part  in  play.  Thus  a  Kinder- 
garten teacher  was  wont  to  oe  besieged  with  questions 
of  this  kind  from  her  small  boys  when  playing  at 
being  animals  :  "  Do  walruses  swim  fast  or  slow  ? " 
*'  Do  lions  climb  trees  ?  " 

One  feature  in  this  pursuit  of  fact  is  the  great  store 
which  a  child  sets  by  names  of  things.  It  has  been 
pointed  out  by  a  French  writer  that  the  form  of  ques- 
tion :  "  What  is  this  ? "  often  means,  "  What  is  it 
called  ?  "  A  child  is  apt  to  think  that  everything  has 
its  own  name.  One  little  boy  explained  to  his  mother 
that  he  thought  all  the  frogs,  the  mice,  the  birds  and 


46  Children's  Ways 

the  butterflies  had  names  given  to  them  by  theif 
mothers,  just  as  babies  have.  Perhaps  children  when 
they  find  out  the  name  of  a  new  thing  feel  that  they 
know  it,  that  they  have  been  introduced  to  it,  so  to 
speak. 

Another  motive  in  this  early  questioning  is  the 
desire  for  an  explanation  of  what  is  seen  or  heard 
about  the  reason  and  the  cause  of  things.  It  takes 
the  well-known  forms,  "  Why  ?  "  "  Who  made  ?  "  and 
so  forth.  Who  that  has  tried  to  instruct  the  small 
child  of  three  or  four  does  not  know  the  long  shrill 
whine-like  sound  of  this  question  ? 

Nothing  perhaps  in  child  utterance  is  better  worth 
interpreting,  hardly  anything  more  difficult  to  inter- 
pret, than  this  simple-looking  little  "why?" 

Let  us  in  judging  of  this  pitiless  "why?"  try  to 
understand  the  situation  of  the  small  searcher  con- 
fronted by  so  much  that  is  strange  and  puzzling  in 
nature,  and  in  human  life  alike.  Just  because  he  is 
born  a  thinker  he  must  try  at  least  to  bring  the 
strange  thing  into  some  connection  with  his  familiar 
world.  And  what  is  more  natural  than  to  go  to  the 
wise  lips  of  the  grown-up  for  a  solution  of  the 
difficulty? 

The  demand  for  the  reason  or  explanation  of  a 
thing  may  be  satisfied  by  a  bare  reference  to  some 
other  thing  which  is  similar  and  so  fitted  to  throw  the 
light  of  familiarity  on  what  is  new  and  strange.  For 
example,  you  may  sometimes  still  a  child's  question- 
ing as  to  why  pussy  has  fur  by  telling  him  that  it  is 
pussy's  hair.  A  child  may  find  an  appeasement,  too, 
of  his  logical  appetite  in  learning  that  what  is  new 
and  strange  to  him  comes  under  a  general  rule,  that, 


The  Serious  Searcher.  47 

for  example,  many  other  animals  besides  pussy  have 
fur. 

Nevertheless,  I  suspect  that  a  child's  "why?"  aims 
farther  than  this  ;  that  it  is  only  fully  appeased  by  a 
knowledge  of  what  we  older  folk  call  a  reason,  that  is  to 
say  of  the  cause  which  originates  a  thing,  and  of  the 
purpose  which  it  serves.  It  is  easy  to  see,  indeed,  that 
this  questioning  curiosity  of  the  little  ones  is  largely 
directed  to  the  subject  of  origins  or  makings.  What 
hours  and  hours  do  they  not  spend  in  wondering  how 
the  pebbles,  the  stones,  the  birds,  the  babies  are 
made  ! 

The  inquiry  into  origin  starts  with  the  amiable 
presupposition  that  all  things  have  been  produced  by 
hand-craft  after  the  manner  of  household  possessions. 
The  world  is  a  sort  of  big  house  where  everything  has 
been  made  by  somebody,  or  at  least  fetched  from 
somewhere.  And  this  is  perhaps  natural  enough,  for  of 
the  things  whose  production  the  child  sees  are  not  the 
larger  number  fashioned  by  human  hands  ?  He  him- 
self makes  a  considerable  number  of  things,  including 
these  rents  in  his  clothes,  messes  on  the  tablecloth, 
and  the  like,  which  he  gets  firmly  imprinted  on  his 
memory  by  the  authorities.  And,  then,  he  is  wont  to 
watch  with  a  keen  interest  the  making  of  things  by 
others,  such  as  puddings,  clothes,  houses,  hay-ricks. 
To  ask,  then,  who  made  the  animals,  the  babies,  the 
wind,  the  clouds,  and  so  forth,  is  for  him  merely  to 
apply  the  type  of  causation  which  is  familiar  to  him. 

The  demand  for  a  reason  takes  on  a  more  special 
meaning  when  the  idea  of  purpose  becomes  clear. 
The  search  now  is  for  the  use  of  a  thing,  the  end 
which  the  maker  had  in  view  when  he  fashioned  it 


48  Children's  Ways. 

When,  for  example,  a  child  asks,  *'  Why  is  there  such 
a  lot  of  dust?"  he  seems  to  be  seeking  the  purpose 
which  the  maker  of  dust  had  in  mind,  or  in  other 
words  the  use  of  dust.  Similarly  when  things  are 
endowed  with  life  and  their  own  purpose,  as  in  asking, 
*'  Why  does  the  wind  blow?  "  Here  the  child  thinks 
of  nature's  processes  as  if  they  were  a  kind  of  human 
action  which  we  can  understand  by  seeing  into  its 
aim. 

Here  are  some  curious  observations  which  seem  to 
illustrate  this  childish  idea  of  how  nature's  processes 
originate.  A  little  girl  whom  we  will  call  M.,  when 
one  year  eleven  months  old,  happened  to  be  walking 
with  her  mother  on  a  windy  day.  At  first  she  was 
delighted  at  the  strong  boisterous  wind,  but  then  got 
tired  and  said :  "  Wind  make  mamma's  hair  untidy, 
Babba  (her  own  name)  make  mamma's  hair  tidy,  so 
wind  not  blow  adain  (again)  ".  About  three  weeks 
later  the  same  child  being  out  in  the  rain  with  her 
mother  said :  "  Mamma,  dy  (dry)  Babba's  hands,  so 
not  rain  any  more".  This  little  inquirer  seems  clearly 
to  have  conceived  of  the  wind  and  rain  as  a  kind  of 
naughty  child  who  can  be  got  to  behave  properly  by 
effacing  the  effects  of  its  naughtiness. 

We  may  notice  something  more  in  this  early  form 
of  questioning.  Children  are  apt  to  think  not  only 
that  things  behave  in  general  after  the  manner  of 
people,  that  their  activity  is  motived  by  some  aim, 
but  that  this  aim  concerns  us  human  creatures.  The 
wind  and  the  rain  came  and  went  in  our  little  girl's 
nature-theory  just  to  vex  and  not  to  vex  "  mamma  " 
and  "  Babba  ".  A  little  boy  of  two  years  two  months 
sitting  on  the  floor  one  day  in  a  bad  temper  looked 


The  Serious  Searcher.  49 

up  and  saw  the  sun  shining  and  said  captiously, "  Sun 
not  look  at  Hennie,"  and  then  more  pleadingly, "  Please, 
sun,  not  look  at  poor  Hennie".  Such  observations 
show  that  children,  like  savages,  and  possibly,  too, 
some  persons  who  would  not  like  to  be  called  savages, 
are  inclined  to  look  at  nature's  doings  as  specially 
designed  to  injure  or  benefit  themselves. 

There  is  reason  to  think  that  the  idea  of  use  is  pro- 
minent in  the  first  conceptions  of  things.  A  French 
inquirer,  M.  Binet,  has  brought  this  fact  out  by  ques- 
tioning a  considerable  number  of  children.  Thus, 
when  asked  what  a  hat  is,  one  child  answered,  "  Pour 
mettre  sur  la  tete".  Similarly  children  asked  by 
other  inquirers,  "What  is  a  tree?"  answered,  "To 
make  the  wind  blow,"  "  To  sit  under,"  and  so  forth. 

Later  on  a  more  scientific  form  of  questioning 
arises.  The  little  searcher  begins  to  understand 
something  about  the  processes  of  nature,  and  tries  by 
questioning  his  elders  to  get  a  glimpse  into  their 
manner  of  working.  This  quest  of  a  natural  explana- 
tion of  things  marks  the  transition  to  the  level  of 
thought  of  the  civilised  man. 

Here,  again,  the  small  investigator  finds  much  hard 
work  to  be  got  through,  for  nature's  doings  are  apt  to 
be  varied  and  rather  complex.  A  child,  for  example, 
finds  that  when  he  dips  his  hand  into  sand,  clay,  or 
what  not,  he  makes  a  hole.  But  when  he  puts  it  into 
water  no  hole  is  left  behind.  Hence  we  can  understand 
one  little  fellow  asking  his  father,  **  How  is  it  that 
when  we  put  our  hand  into  the  water  we  don't  make 
a  hole  in  it  ?  " 

Here  we  have  not  mere  curiosity ;  we  have  per- 
plexity at  what  looks  contradictory  to  the  usual  run 


50  Children's  Ways. 

of  things.  The  same  thing  is  illustrated  in  the  ques- 
tion of  another  little  boy,  "  Can  they  (the  fish)  breathe 
with  their  moufs  under  water  ?  " 

Among  the  things  which  are  apt  to  puzzle  the 
young  inquirer  is  the  disappearance  of  things.  He 
can  as  little  understand  this  as  the  beginning  of  things, 
and  so  he  will  ask  :  "  Where  does  the  sea  swim  to  ?  " 
or  "  Where  does  the  wind  go  to  ?  "  or  "  Where  does 
the  wet  {e.g.,  on  the  pavement  after  rain)  go  to? " 

As  the  view  of  things  begins  to  widen  and  embrace 
the  absent  and  the  past  new  puzzles  occur  and 
prompt  to  a  more  philosophical  kind  of  questioning. 
Sometimes  it  is  the  mere  vastness  of  the  world,  the 
multitude  of  things,  which  oppresses  and  confuses  the 
young  understanding.  "  Mother,"  asked  a  small  boy 
of  four,  "  why  is  there  such  a  lot  of  things  in  the 
world  if  no  one  knows  all  these  things?"  A  little 
girl  about  three  and  a  half  years  old  asked  her 
mother,  "  Mamma,  why  do  there  be  any  more  days, 
why  do  there  ?  and  why  don't  we  leave  off  eating  and 
drinking?  "  It  is  hard  for  us  older  folk  to  get  behind 
questions  like  this  so  as  to  understand  the  source  of 
the  childish  bewilderment. 

The  subject  of  origins  is,  as  we  all  know,  apt  to  be 
a  sore  puzzle  for  the  childish  mind.  The  beginnings 
of  living  things  are,  of  course,  the  great  mystery. 
"  There's  such  a  lot  of  things,"  remarked  the  little 
zoologist  I  have  recently  been  quoting,  "  I  want  to 
know,  that  you  say  nobody  knows,  mamma.  I  want 
•to  know  who  made  God,  and  I  want  to  know  if  pussy 
has  eggs  to  help  her  make  ickle  (little)  kitties." 
Finding  that  this  was  not  so,  he  observed  :  **  Oh, 
then,  I  s'pose  she  has  to  have  God  to  help  her  if  she 


The  Serious  Searcher.  51 

doesn't  have  kitties  in  eggs  given  her  to  sit  on ". 
Another  little  boy,  five  years  old,  found  his  way  to 
the  puzzle  of  the  reciprocal  genetic  relation  of  the  hen 
and  the  egg,  and  asked  his  mother  :  '*  When  there  is 
no  egg  where  does  the  hen  come  from  ?  When  there 
was  no  egg,  I  mean,  where  did  the  hen  come  from  ? " 
Another  little  fellow  was  puzzled  to  know  how  the 
first  child  was  suckled,  or,  as  a  little  girl  of  four  and 
a  half  years  put  it :  "  When  everybody  was  a  baby — 
then  who  could  be  their  nurse — if  they  were  all  babies?" 

In  this  bold  sweep  of  inquiry  a  child  is  apt  to  go 
back  to  the  absolute  beginnings  of  things,  as  when  he 
asks,  "Who  made  God  ?  "  or,  "  What  was  there  before 
God  ?  "  The  idea  that  God  has  always  been  seems 
to  be  particularly  perplexing  and  even  oppressive  to 
a  child's  mind. 

Sometimes  the  questioning  takes  on  a  still  clearer 
ring  of  metaphysics,  startling  and  shocking  perhaps 
the  patient  listener.  A  little  boy  of  three  once  put 
the  poser  :  "  If  I'd  gone  upstairs,  could  God  make  it 
that  I  hadn't  ? "  Or  as  another  boy  of  eight  put  it 
to  a  distinguished  biologist,  "  Mr.  — ,  Mr.  — ,  if  God 
wanted  me  to  be  good,  and  I  wouldn't  be  good,  who 
would  win  ?  "  Needless  to  say  that  this  young  philo- 
sopher was  a  Britisher. 

With  many  children  confronted  with  the  mysteries 
of  God  and  the  devil  this  questioning  often  reproduces 
the  directions  of  theological  speculation.  Thus  the 
problem  of  the  necessity  of  evil  is  clearly  recognisable 
in  the  question  once  put  by  an  American  boy  under 
eight  years  of  age  to  a  priest  who  visited  his  home ; 
"  Father,  why  don't  God  kill  the  devil  and  then  there 
would  be  no  more  wickedness  in  the  world  ?  " 


52  Children's  Ways. 

The  different  h'nes  of  questioning  here  briefly 
illustrated  are  apt  to  run  on  concurrently  from  about 
the  end  of  the  third  year,  a  fit  of  eager  curiosity  about 
animals  or  other  natural  objects  giving  place  to  a  fit 
of  theological  inquiry,  this  again  being  dropped  for  an 
equally  eager  inquiry  into  the  making  of  clocks,  rail- 
way engines,  and  so  on.  Yet,  through  these  alternat- 
ing bouts  of  questioning  we  can  recognise  laws  of 
progress.  Thus  children  will  ask  first  about  the  things 
which  first  interest  them,  as,  for  example,  animals  and 
babies.  Again  the  questioning  grows  gradually  more 
intelligent,  more  reasonable,  accommodating  itself, 
often  after  much  suffering,  to  the  adamantine  limits 
of  human  knowledge. 

While  I  have  here  regarded  children's  questioning 
seriously  as  the  expression  of  a  genuine  desire  for 
knowledge,  I  am  well  aware  that  this  cannot  be  said 
ofallof  it.  The  hard-pressed  mother  knows  that  a 
child's  "  why  ?"  is  often  used  in  a  sleepy  mechanical 
way  with  no  real  desire  for  knowledge,  any  semblance 
of  answer  being  accepted  without  an  attempt  to  put 
a  meaning  into  it.  A  good  deal  of  the  more  reckless 
kind  of  children's  asking,  when  one  question  is 
followed  by  another  with  an  irritating  pertinacity, 
appears  to  be  of  this  formal  and  lifeless  character. 
Some  of  it,  indeed,  as  when  a  little  American  asked 
her  mother :  "  Mamma,  why  ain't  Edna  Belle  (her 
baby  sister)  me,  and  why  ain't  I  Edna  Belle?" 
comes  alarmingly  near  the  rage  of  questioning  ob- 
served in  certain  forms  of  mental  disease,  and  may 
perhaps  be  a  symptom  of  an  over-wrought  brain. 

To  admit  this,  however,  is  far  from  saying  that  we 
ought  to  treat  all  this  questioning  with  a  mild  con- 


The  Serious  Searcher.  53 

tempt.  The  little  questioners  flatter  us  by  attributing 
superior  knowledge  to  us,  and  good  manners  should 
compel  us  to  treat  their  questions  with  some  attention. 
And  if  now  and  then  they  torment  us  with  a  string  of 
random  reckless  questioning,  in  how  many  cases,  one 
wonders,  are  they  not  made  to  suffer,  and  that  wrong- 
fully, by  having  perfectly  serious  questions  rudely 
cast  back  on  their  hands  ? 


CHAPTER  V. 

FIRST  THOUGHTS:   (a)  THE  NATURAL  WORLD. 

We  have  seen  in  the  last  chapter  that  children  have 
their  characteristic  ways  of  looking  at  their  new 
world.  These  ways  often  result  in  the  formation  of 
definite  ideas  or  "  thoughts"  which  may  last  for  years. 
We  will  now  try  to  follow  the  little  thinker  in  his 
first  attempt  at  framing  a  theory  of  Nature  and  her 
doings. 

Here,  too,  we  shall  find  that  the  active  little  brain 
has  its  work  cut  out  for  it.  As  already  suggested, 
things  are  often  so  puzzling  to  the  child  that  it  is  only 
by  dint  of  a  good  deal  of  questioning  that  he  can 
piece  them  together  at  all.  And  even  after  he  has 
had  his  questions  answered  he  sometimes  finds  it  well- 
nigh  impossible  to  reconcile  one  fact  with  another, 
and  to  reach  a  clear  view  of  things  as  a  whole. 

The  Fashion  of  Things. 

The  first  thoughts  on  Nature  and  her  processes  are 
moulded  very  largely  by  the  tendencies  of  the  young 
mind  touched  on  in  the  last  chapter.  Like  the  savage 
the  child  is  apt  to  think  of  the  wind  and  the  thunder 
as  somebody's  doing,  and  as  aimed  specially  at  himself. 
Hence  the  strongly  marked  mythological  or  super- 
natural element  in  children's  theories.       Here,  it  is 


First  Thoughts  :  {a)  The  Natural  World.   ^$ 

evident,  thought  is  supported  by  a  somewhat  capri- 
cious fancy.  When,  for  example,  a  child  accounts 
for  the  wind  by  saying  that  somebody  is  waving  a 
very  big  fan  somewhere,  or,  more  prettily,  that  it  is 
made  by  the  fanning  of  the  angels'  wings,  he  comes 
very  near  that  romancing  which  we  have  regarded  as 
the  play  of  imagination.  Yet  though  fanciful  it  is 
still  thought,  just  because  it  aims,  however  wildly,  at 
explaining  something  in  the  real  world. 

With  this  fanciful  and  mythological  element  there 
goes  a  more  scientific  one.  Even  the  fan  myth  re- 
cognises a  mechanical  process,  viz.,  the  waving  of 
something  to  and  fro,  which  does  undoubtedly  pro- 
duce a  movement  of  the  air.  Children's  first  theories 
of  nature  often  show  a  queer  mingling  of  supernatural 
and  natural  conceptions. 

I  propose  now  to  examine  a  few  of  the  commoner 
ideas  of  children  respecting  natural  objects. 

One  characteristic  of  this  first  thought  about  things 
appears  at  an  early  age.  A  child  seems  inclined  to 
take  all  that  he  sees  for  real  tangible  substance :  it  is 
some  time  before  he  learns  that  "  things  are  not  what 
they  seem  ".  For  example,  an  infant  will  try  to  touch 
shadows,  sunlight  dancing  on  the  wall  and  flat  objects 
in  pictures.  This  tendency  to  make  things  out  of  all 
he  sees  shows  itself  in  pretty  forms,  as  when  a  little  girl 
one  year  eleven  months  old, "  gathered  sunlight  in  her 
hands  and  put  it  on  her  face,"  and  about  a  month 
earlier  expressed  a  wish  to  wash  some  black  smoke. 
This  was  the  same  child  that  tried  to  make  the  wind 
behave  by  tidying  her  mother's  hair ;  and  her  belief 
in  the  material  reality  of  the  wind  was  shown  by  her 
asking  her  mother  to  lift  her  up  high  so  that  she 


^6  Children's  Ways. 

might  see  the  wind  ;  which  reminds  one  of  R.  L. 
Stevenson's  lines  to  the  wind  : — 

I  felt  you  push,  I  heard  you  call, 
I  could  not  see  yourself  at  all. 

In  making  a  reality  out  of  the  wind  a  child  is  led  not 
by  sight,  but  by  touch.  He/ee/s  the  wind,  and  so  the 
wind  must  be  something  substantial. 

The  common  childish  thought  about  the  wind  shows 
that  the  young  mind  is  apt  to  be  much  impressed 
by  the  movements  of  things.  Movement  seems  for 
all  of  us  the  clearest  and  most  impressive  manifesta- 
tion of  life.  When  the  movement  of  an  object  is  not 
seen  to  be  caused  by  some  other  object,  but  seems  to 
be  spontaneous,  it  is  apt  to  be  taken  by  children  as 
by  uncivilised  races  to  be  the  sign  of  life,  and  of 
something  like  human  impulse.  A  child  of  eighteen 
months  used  to  throw  kisses  to  the  fire.  Some  chil- 
dren in  the  infant  department  of  a  London  Board 
School  were  asked  what  things  in  the  room  were  alive, 
and  they  promptly  replied  :  "  The  smoke  and  the  fire". 
Big  things  moving  by  some  internal  contrivance  of 
which  the  child  knows  nothing,  more  especially 
engines,  are  of  course  endowed  with  life.  A  little  girl 
of  thirteen  months  offered  a  biscuit  to  a  steam-tram, 
and  the  author  of  T/ie  hivisible  Playmate  tells  us  that 
his  little  girl  wanted  to  stroke  the  "dear  head"  of  a 
locomotive. 

Next  to  movement  a  sound  which  seems  to  be  pro- 
duced by  the  thing  itself  leads  children  to  endow  it 
with  life.  Are  not  movement  and  vocal  sound  the 
two  great  channels  by  which  the  child  itself  expresses 
its   feelings   and   impulses?     The  wind   often   owes 


First  Thoughts  :   (a)  The  Natural  World.   57 

something  of  its  life  to  its  sound.  The  common 
tendency  of  children  to  think  of  the  sea  as  alive,  of 
which  M.  Pierre  Loti  gives  an  excellent  illustration 
in  his  Roman  dun  enfant,  is  no  doubt  based  on  the 
perception  of  its  noise  and  movement.  A  little  boy 
assured  his  teacher  that  the  wind  was  alive,  for  he 
heard  it  whistling  in  the  night.  The  impulse,  too,  to 
endow  with  life  an  object  which  looks  so  very  much 
of  a  machine  as  a  railway  engine,  is  probably  sup- 
ported by  the  knowledge  of  its  puffing  and  whistling. 

Closely  related  to  this  impulse  to  ascribe  life  to 
what  we  call  inanimate  objects  is  the  tendency  to 
conceive  of  them  as  growing.  This  is  illustrated  in 
the  remark  of  a  little  boy  of  three  and  a  half  years 
who  when  criticised  by  his  mother  for  trying  to  make 
a  walking-stick  out  of  a  very  short  stick,  observed  : 
"Me  use  it  for  walking-stick  when  stick  be  bigger". 

I  have  referred  in  the  last  chapter  to  children's  way 
of  thinking  of  things  as  made  by  somebody.  The 
idea  of  hand-work  is  extended  in  odd  ways.  For 
example,  quite  young  children  are  apt  to  extend  the 
ideas  broken  and  mended  to  all  kinds  of  objects. 
Anything  which  seems  to  have  become  reduced  by 
losing  a  portion  of  itself  is  said  to  be  "  broken  ".  Thus 
a  little  boy  of  three,  on  seeing  the  moon  partly  covered 
by  a  cloud,  remarked  :  "The  moon  is  broken".  On 
the  other  hand,  in  the  case  of  one  little  boy,  every- 
thing not  broken  or  intact  was  said  to  be  "  mended  ". 
Do  children  when  they  talk  in  this  fashion  really 
think  that  things  are  constantly  undergoing  repairs  at 
the  hand  of  some  mysterious  mechanic,  or  are  they 
using  their  familiar  terms  figuratively  in  default  of 
others  ?  It  is  hard  to  say. 
5 


58  Children's  Ways. 

Curious  thoughts  about  Nature's  processes  arise  later 
when  the  inquirer  tries  to  make  them  intelHgible  to  him- 
self. Here  the  first  mechanical  conceptions  of  the  wind 
deserve  attention.  An  American  child,  asked  what  a 
tree  was,  answered  oddly,  "  To  make  the  wind  blow  ". 
A  pupil  of  mine  distinctly  recalls  that  when  a  child 
he  accounted  for  the  wind  at  night  by  the  swaying  of 
two  large  elms  which  stood  in  front  of  the  house  not 
far  from  the  windows  of  his  bedroom.  This  putting 
of  the  cart  before  the  horse  is  funny  enough,  yet  it  is 
perfectly  natural.  All  the  wind-making  a  child  can 
observe,  as  in  blowing  with  his  mouth,  waving  a 
newspaper,  and  so  forth,  is  effected  by  the  movement 
of  a  material  object. 

The  Bigger  World, 

With  respect  to  distant  objects,  a  child  is  of  course 
freer  to  speculate,  and,  as  we  know,  his  ideas  of  the 
heavenly  bodies  are  wont  to  be  odd  enough.  His 
thoughts  about  these  remote  objects  are  rendered 
quainter  by  his  inability  to  conceive  of  great  dis- 
tances. 

Children  naturally  enough  take  this  world  to  be 
what  it  looks  to  their  uninstructed  eyes.  Thus  the 
earth  becomes  a  circular  plain,  and  the  sky  a  sort  of 
inverted  bowl  placed  upon  it.  Many  children  appear 
like  the  ancients  to  suppose  that  the  sky  and  the 
heavenly  bodies  touch  the  earth  somewhere,  and 
could  be  reached  by  taking  a  long,  long  journey. 
Other  and  similar  ideas  are  formed  by  some.  Thus 
one  little  girl  used  on  looking  at  the  sky  to  fancy  she 
was  inside  a  blue  balloon.     The  heavenly  bodies  are 


First  Thoughts  :   (a)  The  Natural  World.  59 

apt  to  be  taken  for  flat  discs.  The  brother  of  the 
little  girl  just  referred  to  took  the  sun  to  be  a  big 
kind  of  cask  cover,  which  could  be  put  on  the  round 
globe  to  make  a  "  see-saw  ". 

When  this  first  simple  creed  gets  corrected,  children 
go  to  work  to  put  a  meaning  into  what  is  told  them 
by  their  instructors.  Thus  they  begin  to  speculate 
about  the  other  side  of  the  globe,  and,  as  Mr.  Barrie 
reminds  us,  are  apt  to  fancy  they  can  know  about  it 
by  peeping  down  a  well.  When  religious  instruction 
introduces  the  new  region  of  heaven  they  are  wont  to 
localise  it  just  above  the  sky,  which  to  their  thought 
forms  its  floor.  Some  hard  thinking  is  carried  out  by 
the  young  heads  in  the  effort  to  reconcile  the  various 
things  they  learn  about  the  celestial  region.  Thus 
the  sky  is  apt  to  be  thought  of  as  tMn,  probably  by 
way  of  explaining  the  light  of  the  stars  and  moon, 
which  is  supposed  to  shine  through  the  sky-roof.  One 
American  child  ingeniously  applied  the  idea  of  the 
thinness  of  the  sky  to  explain  the  appearance  of  the 
moon  when  one  part  is  bright  and  the  other  faintly 
illumined,  supposing  it  to  be  half-way  through  a  sort 
of  semi-transparent  curtain.  Others  again  prettily  ac- 
counted for  the  waning  of  the  moon  to  a  crescent  by 
saying  it  was  half  stuck  or  half  "buttoned"  into  the  sky. 

Characteristic  movements  of  childish  thought  show 
themselves  in  framing  ideas  of  the  making  of  the 
world.  The  boy  of  four  described  by  Mrs,  Jardine 
thought  that  the  stars  were  "  cut  out "  first,  and  that 
then  the  little  bits  left  over  were  all  rolled  into  the 
moon.  Such  an  idea  of  cosmogony  seems  nonsense 
till  one  remembers  the  work  of  cutting  out  the  finer 
figures  in  paper. 


6o  Children's  Ways. 

In  much  the  same  way  children  try  to  understand 
the  movements  of  the  sun  and  other  heavenly  bodies 
by  help  of  the  familiar  movements  of  terrestrial  objects. 
Thus  the  sun  was  thought  by  American  children  to 
fly,  to  be  blown,  perhaps  like  a  soap-bubble  or  air- 
ball,  and,  by  a  child  with  a  more  mechanical  turn,  to 
roll,  presumably  as  a  hoop  rolls,  and  so  forth.  Theo- 
logical ideas,  too,  are  pressed  into  the  service  of 
childish  explanation,  as  when  the  disappearance  of 
the  sun  is  ascribed  to  God's  pulling  it  up  higher  out 
of  sight,  to  his  taking  it  into  heaven  and  putting  it  to 
bed,  and  the  like. 

The  impressive  phenomena  of  thunder  and  lightning 
give  rise  in  the  case  of  the  child  as  in  that  of  the 
Nature-man  to  some  fine  myth-making.  The  Ameri- 
can children,  as  already  observed,  have  different 
mechanical  illustrations  for  describing  the  super- 
natural operation  here,  thunder  being  thought  of  as 
the  noise  made  by  God  when  groaning,  when  walking 
heavily  on  the  floor  of  heaven,  when  he  has  coals  "  run 
in  " — ideas  which  show  how  naively  the  child-mind 
humanises  the  Deity,  making  him  a  respectable  citizen 
with  a  house  and  a  coal-cellar.  In  like  manner  the 
lightning  is  attributed  to  God's  lighting  the  gas,  or 
striking  many  matches  at  once.  By  a  similar  use  of 
familiar  household  operations  God  is  supposed  to 
cause  rain  by  turning  on  a  tap,  or  by  letting  it  down 
from  a  cistern  by  a  hose,  or,  better,  by  passing  it 
through  a  sieve  or  a  dipper  with  holes.^ 

Throughout  the  whole  region  of  these  mysterious 
phenomena  we  have  illustrations  of  the  tendency  to 

*  I  am  indebted  for  these  illustrations  to  an  article  by  Dr.  Stanley 
HaJl  on  "  The  Contents  of  Children's  Minds". 


First  Thoughts  :  (a)  The  Natural  World.  6i 

regard  what  takes  place  as  designed  for  us  poor 
mortals.  Thus  one  of  the  American  children  referred 
to  said  charmingly  that  the  moon  comes  round  when 
people  forget  to  light  the  lamps.  The  little  girl  of 
whom  Mr,  Canton  writes  thought  "the  wind  and  the 
rain  and  the  moon  '  walking '  came  out  to  see  Aer,  and 
the  flowers  woke  up  with  the  same  laudable  object". 
When  frightened  by  the  crash  of  the  thunder  a  child 
instinctively  thinks  that  it  is  all  done  to  vex  his  little 
soul.  An  earthquake  may  be  thought  of  as  a  kind  of 
wonder  show,  specially  got  up  for  the  admiration  of  a 
sufficient  body  of  spectators.  Two  children,  D.  and 
K.,  aged  ten  and  five  respectively,  lived  in  a  small 
American  town.  D.,  who  was  reading  about  an 
earthquake,  addressed  his  mother  thus  :  "  Oh,  isn't  it 
dreadful,  mamma?  Do  you  suppose  we  will  ever 
have  one  here  ?  "  K.,  intervening  with  the  character- 
istic impulse  of  the  young  child  to  correct  his  elders, 
answered  :  "  Why,  no,  D.,  they  don't  have  earthquakes 
in  little  towns  like  this  ".  Later  on  Nature's  arrange- 
ments are  criticised  from  the  same  point  of  view.  A 
girl  of  seven,  going  back  to  the  interesting  question 
of  babies,  remarked  to  her  mother :  "  Wouldn't  it  be 
convenient  if  you  laid  an  egg,  and  then  if  you  changed 
your  mind  you  needn't  hatch  it  ? " 

Dreams. 

Children  are  apt  to  have  their  own  thoughts  about 
the  strange  semblances  of  objects  which  sometimes 
present  themselves  to  their  eyes,  more  particularly 
the  "  spectra  "  which  we  see  after  looking  at  the  sun 
or  when   the  circulation  of  the  retina  is  disturbed. 


Si  Children's  Ways. 

One  little  fellow  spun  quite  a  romance  about  the 
spectra  he  used  to  see  when  poorly,  saying  that  they 
were  angels,  and  that  they  went  into  his  toy-basket 
and  played  with  his  toys. 

The  most  common  form  of  such  illusory  appearance 
is,  of  course,  the  dream,  and  I  believe  that  children 
dwell  much  on  the  mystery  of  dreaming.  The 
simpler  kind  of  child,  like  the  savage,  is  disposed  to 
take  his  dreams  for  sensible  realities.  A  boy  in  an 
elementary  school  in  London,  aged  five  years,  said 
one  day :  "  Teacher,  I  saw  an  old  woman  one  night 
against  my  bed  ".  Another  child,  a  little  girl  in  the 
same  school,  told  her  mother  that  she  had  seen  a 
funeral  last  night,  and  on  being  asked,  "Where?" 
answered  quaintly,  "  I  saw  it  in  my  pillow ".  A 
little  boy  whom  I  know  once  asked  his  mother  not 
to  put  him  to  bed  in  a  certain  room,  "because  there 
were  so  many  dreams  in  the  room  ". 

Yet  children  who  reflect  soon  find  out  that  dream- 
objects  do  not  belong  to  the  common  world,  in  the 
sights  of  which  we  all  partake.  Another  theory  has 
then  to  be  found.  I  believe  that  many  children, 
especially  those  who,  being  imaginative  when  awake, 
make  their  fairy-stories  and  their  own  romancings 
very  real  to  themselves,  and  who,  as  a  result  of  this, 
are  wont  to  return  to  them  in  their  dreams,  are  in- 
clined to  identify  dreamland  and  fairyland.  If  they 
want  to  see  their  "  fairies  "  by  day  they  will  shut  their 
eyes  ;  and  so  the  idea  may  naturally  enough  occur  to 
them  that  when  closing  their  eyes  for  sleep  they  are 
going  to  see  the  beloved  fairies  again,  and  for  a  longer 
time.  Other  ideas  about  dreams  also  occur  among 
children.     A  gentleman  tells  me  that  when  a  child  he 


First  Thoughts  :  (a)  The  Natural  World.   $2 

used  to  think  that  dreaming,  though  different  from 
actual  seeing,  was  yet  more  than  having  one's  own 
individual  fancies  ;  on  dreaming,  for  example,  that  he 
had  met  certain  people  he  supposed  that  each  of  these 
must  have  had  a  dream  in  which  he  had  met  him. 
This,  it  may  be  remembered,  is  very  much  the  fanci- 
ful idea  of  dreaming  which  Mr.  Du  Maurier  works 
out  in  his  pretty  story  Peter  Ibbetson. 

There  is  some  evidence  to  show  that  a  thoughtful 
child,  when  he  begins  to  grasp  the  truth  that  dreams 
are  only  unreal  phantasms,  becomes  confused,  and 
wonders  whether  the  things  too  which  we  see  when 
waking  are  not  unreal.  Here  is  a  quaint  example  of 
this  transference  of  childish  doubt  from  dreamland  to 
the  every-day  world.  A  little  boy  five  years  old 
asked  his  teacher  :  "  Wouldn't  it  be  funny  if  we  were 
dreaming?"  and  being  satisfied  by  the  reply  elicited 
that  it  would  be  funny,  he  continued  more  explicitly  : 
"  Supposing  every  one  in  the  whole  world  were  dream- 
ing, wouldn't  that  be  funny  ?  They  might  be,  mightn't 
they?"  Receiving  a  slightly  encouraging,  "Perhaps 
they  might,"  he  wound  up  his  argument  in  this  fashion  : 
"Yes,  but  I  don't  think  we  are — I'm  sure  we  are  not. 
Perhaps  we  should  wake  up  and  find  every  one  gone 
away."  This  is  dark  enough,  but  suggests,  I  think, 
that  doubt  as  to  the  bright  beautiful  forms  seen  in 
sleep  is  casting  its  shadow  on  the  real  world,  on  the 
precious  certainty  of  the  presence  of  those  we  love. 
A  little  girl  about  six  and  a  half  years  old  being 
instructed  by  her  father  as  to  the  making  of  the 
world  remarked  :  "  Perhaps  the  world's  a  fancy ". 
The  doubt  in  this  case  too  was,  one  may  conjecture, 
led  up  to  by  the  loss  of  faith  in  dreamland. 


64  Children's  Ways. 

Birth  and  Growth. 

We  may  now  pass  to  some  of  children's  character- 
istic thoughts  about  living  things,  more  particularly 
human  beings,  and  the  familiar  domestic  animals. 
The  most  interesting  of  these,  I  think,  are  those 
respecting  growth  and  birth. 

As  already  mentioned,  the  growth  of  things  is  one 
of  the  most  stimulating  of  childish  puzzles.  Led  no 
doubt  by  what  others  tell  him,  a  child  finds  that 
things  are  in  general  made  bigger  by  additions  from 
without,  and  his  earliest  conception  of  growth  is,  I 
think,  that  of  such  addition.  Thus,  plants  are  made 
to  grow,  that  is,  swell  out,  by  the  rain.  The  idea 
that  the  growth  or  expansion  of  animals  comes  from 
eating  is  easily  reached  by  the  childish  intelligence, 
and,  as  we  know,  nurses  and  parents  have  a  way  of 
recommending  the  less  attractive  sorts  of  diet  by 
telling  children  that  they  will  make  them  grow.  The 
idea  that  the  sun  makes  us  grow,  often  suggested  by 
parents  (who  may  be  ignorant  of  the  fact  that  growth 
is  more  rapid  in  the  summer  than  in  the  winter),  is 
probably  interpreted  by  the  analogy  of  an  infusion  of 
something  into  the  body. 

A  number  of  children,  I  have  found,  have  the 
queer  notion  that  towards  the  end  of  life  there  is  a 
process  of  shrinkage.  Old  people  are  supposed  to 
become  little  again.  One  of  the  American  children 
referred  to,  a  little  girl  of  three,  once  said  to  her 
mother :  "  When  I  am  a  big  girl  and  you  are  a  little 
girl  I  shall  whip  you  just  as  you  whipped  me  now". 
At  first  one  is  almost  disposed  to  think  that  this 
child  must  have  heard  of  Mr.  Anstey's  amusing  story, 


First  Thoughts  :   {a)  The  Natural  World.   65 

Vice  VersA.  Yet  I  have  collected  a  number  of 
similar  observations.  For  example,  a  little  boy  that 
I  know,  when  about  three  and  a  half  years  old,  used 
often  to  say  to  his  mother  with  perfect  seriousness  of 
manner :  "  When  I  am  big  then  you  will  be  little, 
then  I  will  carry  you  about  and  dress  you  and  put 
you  to  sleep".  And  one  little  girl  asked  about  some 
old  person  of  her  acquaintance :  "  When  will  she 
begin  to  get  small  ?  "  Another  little  girl  asked  her 
grown-up  cousin  who  was  reading  to  her  something 
about  an  old  woman  :  "  Do  people  turn  back  into 
babies  when  they  get  quite  old  ?  " 

Another  interesting  fact  to  be  noted  here  is  that 
some  children  firmly  believe  that  persons  after  dying 
and  going  to  heaven  will  return  to  earth  as  little 
children.  An  American  lady  writes  to  me  that  two 
of  her  boys  found  their  way  independently  of  each 
other  to  this  idea.  Thus  one  of  them  speaking  of  a 
playmate  who  had  been  drowned,  and  who  was  now, 
he  was  told,  in  heaven,  remarked  :  "  Then  God  will 
let  him  come  back  and  be  a  baby  again  ". 

What,  it  may  be  asked,  is  the  explanation  of  this 
quaint  childish  thought  ?  I  think  it  probable  that  it  is 
suggested  in  different  ways.  One  must  remember  that 
as  a  child  grows  taller  grown-ups  may  seem  by  com- 
parison to  get  shorter.  Again  old  people  are  wont  to 
stoop  and  so  to  look  shorter ;  and  then  children  often 
hear  in  their  stories  of  "little  old"  people.  I  suspect, 
however,  that  in  some  cases  there  is  a  more  subtle 
train  of  thought.  As  the  belief  of  the  two  brothers  in 
people's  coming  back  from  heaven  suggests,  the  idea  of 
shrinkage  is  connected  with  those  of  birth  and  death. 
May  it  not  be  that  the  more  thoughtful  sort  of  child 


66  Children's  Ways. 

reasons  in  this  way?  Babies  which  are  sent  from 
heaven  must  have  been  something  there ;  and  people 
when  they  die  must  continue  to  be  something  in 
heaven.  Why,  then,  the  "  dead  "  people  that  go  to 
this  place  are  the  very  same  as  the  babies  that  come 
from  it.  To  make  this  theory  "  square  "  with  other 
knowledge,  the  idea  of  shrinkage,  either  before  or  after 
death,  has  to  be  called  in.  That  it  takes  place  before 
death  is  supported  by  what  was  said  above,  and  pro- 
bably also  by  the  information  often  given  to  children 
that  people  when  they  die  are  carried  by  angels  to 
heaven  just  as  the  babies  are  said  to  be  brought  down 
to  earth  by  the  angels. 

The  origin  of  babies  and  young  animals  furnishes 
the  small  brain,  as  we  have  seen,  with  much  food  for 
speculation.  Here  the  little  thinker  is  not  often  left 
to  excogitate  a  theory  for  himself.  His  inconvenient 
questionings  in  this  direction  have  to  be  firmly 
checked,  and  thus  arise  the  well-known  legends 
about  the  doctor,  the  angel  and  so  forth.  With  the 
various  lore  thus  collected,  supplemented  by  the 
pretty  conceits  of  Hans  Andersen  and  other  writers  of 
fairy  stories,  the  young  inquirer  has  to  do  his  best. 

How  the  child-thinker  is  apt  to  go  to  work  here  is 
illustrated  in  a  collection  of  the  thoughts  of  Ameri- 
can school-children.  Some  of  these  said  that  God 
drops  babies  for  the  women  and  doctors  to  catch 
them,  others  that  he  brings  them  down  to  earth  by 
means  of  a  wooden  ladder,  others  again,  that  mamma, 
nurse,  or  doctor  goes  up  and  fetches  them  in  a 
balloon.  They  are  said  by  other  children  to  grow  in 
cabbages,  or  to  be  placed  by  God  in  water,  perhaps 
in  the  sewer,  where  they  are  found  by  the  doctor, 


First  Thoughts  :   [a)  The  Natural  World.   67 

who  takes  them  to  sick  folks  that  want  them.  Here 
we  have  delicious  touches  of  childish  fancy,  quaint 
adaptations  of  fairy  and  Bible  lore,  as  in  the  use  of 
Jacob's  ladder  and  the  legend  of  Moses  placed  among 
the  bulrushes,  this  last  being  enriched  by  the  thorough 
master-stroke  of  child-genius,  the  idea  of  the  dark, 
mysterious,  wonder-producing  sewer. 

Not  all  children,  by  any  means,  elaborate  even 
this  crude  sort  of  theory.  The  less  speculative  and 
more  practical  kind  of  child  accepts  what  he  is  told 
and  proceeds  to  apply  it,  sometimes  oddly  enough. 
Thus  the  Lancet  recently  contained  an  amusing  letter 
from  some  children,  the  eldest  of  whom  was  seven, 
addressed  to  a  doctor  asking  for  a  baby  for  their 
mother's  next  birthday.  It  was  to  be  "  fat  and 
bonny,  with  blue  eyes  and  fair  hair" — a  perfect  doll 
in  fact  ;  and  a  characteristic  postscript  asked:  "Which 
would  be  the  cheaper — a  boy  or  a  girl  ?  " 

These  ideas  of  children  about  babies  partly  com- 
municated by  others,  partly  thought  out  for  them- 
selves, are  naturally  enough  made  to  account  for  the 
beginnings  of  animal  life.  This  is  illustrated  in  the 
supposition  of  the  little  boy,  already  quoted,  who 
thought  that  God  helps  pussy  to  have  "  'ickle  kitties," 
seeing  that  she  hasn't  any  kitties  in  eggs  given  her  to 
sit  upon. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

FIRST  THOUGHTS:  (b)  SELF  AND  OTHER  MYSTERIES. 

We  may  now  pass  to  some  of  the  characteristic 
modes  of  child-thought  about  that  standing  mystery, 
the  self.  As  our  discussion  of  the  child's  ideas  of 
origin,  growth  and  final  shrinkage  suggests,  a  good 
deal  of  his  most  earnest  thinking  is  devoted  to  pro- 
blems relating  to  himself. 

T/ie  Visible  Self. 

The  date  of  the  first  thought  about  self,  of  the 
first  dim  stage  of  self-awareness,  probably  varies  con- 
siderably in  the  case  of  different  children  according  to 
the  rapidity  of  the  mental  development  and  to  the 
character  of  the  surrounding  circumstances.  The 
little  girl,  who  was  afterwards  to  be  known  as  George 
Sand,  may  be  supposed  to  have  had  an  exceptional 
development ;  and  the  blow  which  she  received  as  a 
baby  in  arms,  and  to  which  she  ascribes  the  first 
dawn  of  self-consciousness,  was,  of  course,  exceptional 
too.  There  are  probably  many  robust  and  unreflec- 
tive  children,  knowing  little  of  life's  misery,  who  get 
on  extremely  well  without  any  consciousness  of  self. 

The  earliest  idea  of  children  about  "  myself"  is  a 
mental  picture  of  the  body.  They  come  to  learn  that 
their  body  is  different  from  other  objects  of  sense  by 


First  Thoughts :  (F)  Self  and  other  Mysteries.  69 

a  number  of  experiences,  such  as  grasping  the  foot, 
striking  the  head,  receiving  soft  caresses,  kisses,  and 
so  forth.  Such  experiences  may  suffice  to  develop 
even  during  the  first  year  the  idea  that  their  body  is 
"  me "  in  the  sense  that  it  is  the  living  seat  of  pain 
and  pleasure. 

The  moving  limbs  are,  of  course,  a  specially 
interesting  part  of  this  bodily  self.  Yet  there  is 
reason  to  think  that  children  regard  the  trunk  as  the 
most  important  and  vital  part  of  themselves.  Thus 
one  small  boy  who,  when  put  to  bed,  could  not  get 
into  a  comfortable  posture,  said  queerly :  "  I  can't 
get  my  hands  out  of  the  way  of  myself".  This  may 
be  because  they  learn  to  connect  the  impressive 
experiences  of  aches  and  pains  with  the  trunk,  and 
because  they  observe  that  the  maimed  can  do  without 
arms  and  without  legs.  It  is  interesting  to  note  that 
in  the  development  of  the  idea  of  the  soul  by  the  race 
its  seat  was  placed  in  the  trunk,  viz.,  the  heart,  long 
before  it  was  localised  in  the  head.  Children  are 
probably  confirmed  in  this  view  of  the  supreme 
importance  of  the  trunk  by  our  way  of  specially 
referring  to  it  when  speaking  of  the  "  body ". 

About  this  interesting  trunk-body,  what  is  inside 
it,  and  how  it  works,  the  child  speculates  vastly.  The 
experience  of  bleeding  has  suggested  to  some  chil- 
dren that  it  is  filled  with  blood.  When  later  on  the 
young  thinker  hears  of  the  stomach,  bones  and  so 
forth,  he  sets  about  theorising  on  these  mysterious 
matters.  Odd  twistings  of  thought  occur  when  the 
higher  anatomy  is  talked  of  in  his  hearing.  A  six- 
year-old  girl,  of  whom  Mr.  Canton  writes,  thus 
delivered   herself  with  respect  to  the  brain  and  its 


70  Children's  Ways. 

functions :  "  Brain  is  what  you  think  with  in  your 
head,  and  the  more  you  think  the  more  crinkles  there 
are".  The  growth  of  the  folds  was  understood, 
with  charming  childish  simplicity,  as  the  immediate 
effect  of  thought,  like  the  crinkling  of  the  skin  of  the 
forehead. 

At  a  later  stage  of  the  child's  development,  no 
doubt,  when  he  begins  to  grasp  the  idea  of  a  conscious 
thinking  "  I,"  the  head  will  become  a  principal  portion 
of  the  bodily  self.  Children  are  quite  capable  of 
finding  their  way,  in  part  at  least,  to  the  idea  that 
the  mind  has  its  lodgment  in  the  head.  But  it  is 
long  before  this  thought  grows  clear.  This  may 
be  seen  in  children's  talk,  as  when  a  girl  of  four 
spoke  of  her  dolly  as  having  no  sense  in  her  eyes. 
Even  after  a  child  has  learned  from  others  that  we 
think  with  our  brains  he  may  go  on  supposing  that 
our  thoughts  travel  down  to  the  mouth  when  we 
speak. 

Very  interesting  in  connection  with  the  first  stages 
of  development  of  the  idea  of  self  is  the  experience  of 
the  mirror.  It  would  be  absurd  to  expect  a  child 
when  first  placed  before  a  glass  to  recognise  his  own 
face.  He  will  smile  at  the  reflection  as  early  as  the 
tenth  week,  though  this  is  probably  merely  an  expres- 
sion of  pleasure  at  the  sight  of  a  bright  object  If 
held  when  about  six  months  old  in  somebody's  arms 
before  a  glass  a  baby  will  at  once  show  that  he 
recognises  the  image  of  the  familiar  face  of  his  carrier 
by  turning  round  to  the  real  face,  whereas  he  does 
not  recognise  his  own.  He  appears  at  first  and  for 
some  months  to  take  it  for  a  real  object,  sometimes 
smiling  to  it  as  to  a  stranger  and  even  kissing  it,  or. 


First  Thoughts :  (b)  Self  and  other  Mysteries,  7 1 

as  in  the  case  of  a  little  girl    (fifteen   months   old), 
offering  it  things. 

An  infant  will,  we  know,  take  a  shadow  to  be  a 
real  object  and  try  to  touch  it.  Some  children  on 
noticing  their  own  and  other  people's  shadows  on  the 
wall  are  afraid  as  at  something  uncanny.  Here,  too, 
in  time,  as  with  young  animals,  e.g:,  kittens,  the 
strange  appearance  is  taken  as  a  matter  of  course. 

Some  children  seem  to  follow  out  in  part  the  line 
of  thought  of  uncivilised  races,  and  take  reflections 
and  shadows  for  a  kind  of  "double"  of  the  self.  One 
of  Dr.  Stanley  Hall's  correspondents  writes  to  him 
that  he  used  to  have  small  panics  at  his  own  shadow, 
trying  to  run  away  from  it,  and  to  stamp  on  it, 
thinking  it  might  be  his  soul.  We  find  another 
illustration  of  this  doubling  of  the  self  in  the  auto- 
biography of  George  Sand,  which  relates  that  when  a 
child,  reflecting  on  the  impressive  experience  of  the 
echo,  she  invented  a  theory  of  her  double  existence. 
We  know,  too,  that  the  boy  Hartley  Coleridge  dis- 
tinguished among  the  "  Hartleys  "  a  picture  Hartley 
and  a  shadow  Hartley.  To  one  little  boy  the  idea  of 
being  photographed  seemed  uncanny,  as  if  it  were  a 
robbing  himself  of  something  and  the  making  of 
another  self.  But  much  more  needs  to  be  known 
about  these  matters. 

The  prominence  of  the  bodily  element  in  a  child's 
first  idea  of  himself  is  seen  in  the  tendency  to  regard 
his  sameness  as  limited  by  unaltered  bodily  appear- 
ance. A  child  of  six,  with  his  shock  of  curls,  will, 
naturally  enough,  refuse  to  believe  that  he  is  the  same 
as  the  hairless  baby  whose  photograph  the  mother 
shows  him.     One  boy  who  had  attained  to  the  dignity 


72  Children's  Ways. 

of  knickerbockers  used  to  speak  of  his  petticoated 
predecessor  as  a  little  girl. 

The  Hidden  Self. 

In  process  of  time,  however,  what  we  call  the 
conscious  self,  that  which  thinks  and  suffers  and  wills, 
comes  to  be  dimly  discerned.  It  is  probable  that  a 
real  advance  towards  this  true  self-consciousness  takes 
place  towards  the  end  of  the  third  year,  when  the 
difficult  forms  of  language,  "  I,"  "  me,"  "  mine,"  com- 
monly come  to  be  used  with  intelligence.  This  is  borne 
out  by  the  following  story:  A  little  girl  of  three  lying 
in  bed  shut  her  eyes  and  said  :  "  Mother,  you  can't 
see  me  now".  The  mother  replied:  "Oh,  you  little 
goose,  I  can  see  you  but  you  can't  see  me".  To 
which  she  rejoined :  "  Oh,  yes,  I  know  you  can  see 
my  body,  mother,  but  you  can't  see  me  ".  The  "  me  '* 
here  was,  I  suppose,  the  expression  of  the  inner  self 
through  the  eyes.  The  same  child  at  about  the  same 
age  was  concerned  as  to  the  reality  of  her  own  exist- 
ence. One  day  playing  with  her  dolls  she  asked  her 
mother :  "  Mother,  am  /  real,  or  only  a  pretend  like 
my  dolls  ?  " 

The  first  thought  about  self  as  something  existing 
apart  from  all  that  is  seen  is  apt  to  be  very  perplexing 
to  the  thoughtful  child.  As  one  lady  puts  it,  writing 
to  me  of  her  childish  experience  :  "  The  power  of 
feeling  and  acting  and  moving  about  myself,  under 
the  guidance  of  some  internal  self,  amazed  me  con- 
tinually ". 

As  may  be  seen  by  this  quotation,  the  first 
thought  about  self  is  greatly  occupied  with  its  action 


First  Thoughts:   (^)  Self  and  other  Mysteries.   73 

on  the  body.  Among  the  many  things  that  puzzled 
one  much-questioning  little  lad  already  quoted  was 
this  :  "  How  do  my  thoughts  come  down  from  my 
brain  to  my  mouth  :  and  how  does  my  spirit  make  my 
legs  walk  ?  "  A  girl  in  her  fifth  year  wanted  to  know 
how  it  is  we  can  move  our  arm  and  keep  it  still  when 
we  want  to,  while  the  curtain  can't  move  except 
somebody  moves  it. 

The  Unreachable  Past. 

Very  curious  are  the  directions  of  the  first  thought 
about  the  past  self.  The  idea  of  what  we  call  per- 
sonal identity  does  not  appear  to  be  fully  reached  at 
first  ;  the  little  boy  already  quoted  who  referred  to 
his  past  self  by  saying,  "  when  I  was  a  little  girl," 
must  have  had  a  very  hazy  idea  of  his  sameness 
with  that  small  petticoated  person.  It  would  seem, 
indeed,  as  if  a  child  found  it  easy  to  dissociate  his 
present  self  from  his  past,  to  deny  all  kinship  with  it. 

The  difficulty  to  the  child  of  conceiving  of  his 
remote  past,  is  surpassed  by  that  of  trying  to  under- 
stand the  state  of  things  before  he  was  born.  The 
true  mystery  of  birth  for  the  child,  the  mystery  which 
fascinates  and  holds  his  mind,  is  that  of  his  beginning 
to  be.  This  is  illustrated  in  the  question  of  a  little 
boy :  "  Where  was  I  a  hundred  years  ago  ?  Where 
was  I  before  I  was  born  ?  "  It  remains  a  mystery  for 
all  of  us,  only  that  after  a  time  we  are  wont  to  put  it 
aside. 

Even  when  a  child  begins  to  take  in  the  fact  that 
there  was  a  time  when  he  was  not,  he  is  unable  to 
think  of  absolute  non-existence.     A  little  girl  of  three 


74  Children's  Ways. 

being  shown  a  photograph  of  her  family  and  not 
seeing  her  own  face  in  the  group  asked  :  "  Where  is 
me?"  Being  duly  instructed  that  she  was  not  here, 
or  indeed  anywhere,  she  asked  :  "  Was  I  killed  ?  " 

It  is  curious  to  note  the  differences  in  the  attitude 
of  children's  minds  towards  this  mystery,  "  before  you 
were  born  ".  A  child  accustomed  to  be  made  the 
centre  of  others'  interest  may  be  struck  with  the 
blank  in  the  common  home  life  before  his  arrival. 
A  little  girl  of  three,  on  being  told  by  her  mother  of 
something  which  happened  long  before  she  was  born, 
asked  in  amazement:  "And  what  did  you  do  without 
H.  ?     Did  you  cry  all  da}'-  for  her  ?  " 

Sometimes  again,  in  the  more  metaphysical  sort 
of  child,  the  puzzle  relates  to  the  past  existence  of  the 
outer  world.  We  have  all  been  perplexed  by  the 
thought  of  the  earth  and  sky,  and  other  folk  existing 
before  we  were,  and  going  on  to  exist  after  we  cease 
to  be  ;  though  here  again  we  are  apt  to  "  get  used  " 
to  the  puzzle.  Children  may  be  deeply  impressed 
with  this  apparent  contradiction.  Jean  Ingelow  in 
the  interesting  reminiscences  of  her  childhood  writes  : 
"  I  went  through  a  world  of  cogitation  as  to  whether 
it  was  really  true  that  anything  had  been  and  lived 
before  I  was  there  to  see  it".  A  little  boy  of  five 
who  was  rather  given  to  saying  "  clever  "  things,  was 
one  day  asked  by  a  visitor,  who  thought  to  rebuke 
what  she  took  to  be  his  conceit :  "  Why,  M.,  however 
did  the  world  go  round  before  you  came  into  it?" 
M.  at  once  replied  :  "  Why,  it  didnt  go  round.  It 
only  began  five  years  ago."  This  child,  too,  had 
probably  felt  little  Jean  Ingelow's  difficulty. 

A   child  will  sometimes   try  to   escape   from  this 


First  Thoughts :  (b)  Self  and  other  Mysteries.  75 

puzzle  by  way  of  the  supernatural  ideas  already 
referred  to.  If  of  quick  intelligence  he  will  see  in  the 
legend  of  babies  brought  from  heaven  to  earth  a  way 
of  prolonging  his  existence  backwards.  The  same 
little  boy  that  was  so  concerned  to  know  what  his 
mother  had  done  without  him,  happened  one  day  to 
be  passing  a  street  pump  with  his  mother,  when  he 
stopped  and  observed  with  perfect  gravity :  "  There 
are  no  pumps  in  heaven  where  I  came  from  ".  He 
had  evidently  worked  out  the  idea  of  heaven-sent 
babies  into  a  theory  of  pre-natal  existence. 

In  thinking  of  their  past,  children  have  to  en- 
counter that  terrible  mystery,  time.  They  seem  at 
first  quite  unable  to  think  of  time  as  we  think  of 
it,  in  an  abstract  way.  "  To-day,"  "  to-morrow " 
and  "  yesterday "  are  spoken  of  as  things  which 
move.  A  girl  of  four  asked  :  "  Where  is  yester- 
day gone  to  ? "  and  "  Where  will  to-morrow  come 
from  ?  " 

Another  difficulty  is  the  grasping  of  great  lengths 
of  time.  A  child  is  apt  to  exaggerate  greatly 
a  short  period.  The  first  morning  at  school  has 
seemed  an  eternity  to  some  who  have  carried  the 
recollection  of  it  into  middle  life.  Even  the  minutes 
when,  as  Mrs.  Maynell  writes,  "your  mother's  visitor 
held  you  so  long  at  his  knee,  while  he  talked  to  her 
the  excited  gabble  of  the  grown-up,"  may  have 
seemed  very,  very  big.  Possibly  this  sense  of  the 
immeasurable  length  of  certain  experiences  of  child- 
hood gives  to  the  child's  sense  of  past  time  some- 
thing of  an  aching  vastness  which  older  people  can 
hardly  understand.  Do  not  the  words  "  long,  long 
ago,"  when  we  use  them  in  telling  a  child  a  story,  still 


^ 


76  Children's  Ways. 

carry   with   them    for    our    ears   a   strangely   far-of! 
sound? 

Again,  children  find  it  hard  to  map  out  the 
divisions  of  time,  and  to  see  the  relations  of  one 
period  to  another.  One  little  boy  about  five  and  a 
half-finding  that  something  had  happened  before  his 
father  was  born,  asked  whether  it  was  in  the  time 
of  the  Romans.  His  historical  perspective  had,  not 
unnaturally  perhaps,  set  the  "time  of  the  Romans" 
just  before  the  life  of  the  oldest  of  his  household. 

The  Supernatural  World. 

A  child's  first  acquaintance  with  the  supernatural 
is  frequently  made  through  the  medium  of  fairy-story 
or  other  fiction.  And,  as  has  been  suggested  in  an 
earlier  chapter,  he  can  put  a  germ  of  thought  into 
the  tradition  of  a  fairy-world.  It  is,  however,  when 
something  in  the  shape  of  theological  instruction 
supervenes  that  the  supernatural  becomes  a  problem 
for  the  young  intellect.  He  is  told  of  these  mysteri- 
ous things  as  of  certainties,  and  in  the  measure  in 
which  he  is  a  thinker,  he  will  try  to  get  a  clear 
intelligent  view  of  things. 

Like  the  beginning  of  life,  its  ending  is  one  of  the 
recurring  puzzles  of  early  days.  A  child  appears  better 
able  to  imagine  others  dying  than  himself ;  this  seems 
to  be  suggested  by  a  story  published  by  Stanley  Hall 
of  a  little  girl  who  from  six  to  nine  feared  that  all 
other  people  would  die  one  by  one,  and  that  she  would 
be  left  alone  on  the  earth. 

The  first  recoil  from  an  inscrutable  mystery  soon 
begins  to  give  place  to  a  feeling  of  dread.     A  little 


First  Thoughts :  (b)  Self  and  other  Mysteries.  77 

girl  of  three  and  a  half  years  asked  her  mother  to  put 
a  great  stone  on  her  head,  because  she  did  not  want 
to  die.  She  was  asked  how  a  stone  would  prevent  it, 
and  answered  with  perfect  childish  logic :  "  Because  I 
shall  not  grow  tall  if  you  put  a  great  stone  on  my 
head  ;  and  people  who  grow  tall  get  old  and  then 
die  ". 

The  first  way  of  regarding  death  seems  to  be  as 
a  temporary  state  like  sleep,  which  it  so  closely 
resembles.  A  little  boy  of  two  and  a  half  years,  on 
hearing  from  his  mother  of  the  death  of  a  lady  friend, 
at  once  asked :  "  Will  Mrs.  P.  still  be  dead  when  we 
go  back  to  London  ?  " 

The  knowledge  of  burial  gives  a  new  and  alarm- 
ing turn  to  the  child's  thought.  He  now  begins  to 
speculate  much  about  the  grave.  The  instinctive 
tendency  to  carry  over  the  idea  of  life  and  feeling 
to  the  buried  body  is  illustrated  in  the  request  made 
by  a  little  boy  to  his  mother:  '*  Don't  put  earth  on 
my  face  when  I  am  buried  ". 

In  the  case  of  children  who  pick  up  something  of  the 
orthodox  creed  the  idea  of  going  to  heaven  has  some- 
how to  be  grasped  and  put  side  by  side  with  that  of 
burial.  Here  comes  one  of  the  hardest  puzzles  for  the 
logical  child.  One  boy  tried  to  reconcile  the  story  of 
heaven  with  the  fact  of  burial,  at  first  by  assuming 
that  the  good  people  who  went  to  heaven  were  not 
buried  at  all ;  and  later  by  supposing  that  the 
journey  to  heaven  was  somehow  to  be  effected  after 
burial  and  by  way  of  the  grave.  Other  devices  for 
getting  a  consistent  view  of  things  are  also  hit  upon. 
Some  children  have  supposed  that  the  head  only 
passes  into  heaven,  partly  from   taking  the  "body" 


7  8  Children's  Ways. 

to  be  the  trunk  only,  and  partly  from  a  feeling  that 
the  head  is  the  seat  of  the  thinking  mind. 

The  idea  of  dead  people  going  to  heaven  is,  as  we 
know,  pushed  by  the  little  brain  to  its  logical  con- 
sequences. Animals  when  they  die  are,  naturally 
enough,  supposed  to  go  to  heaven  also. 

The  Great  Maker. 

Children  seem  disposed,  apart  from  religious 
instruction,  to  form  ideas  of  supernatural  beings. 
Sometimes  it  is  a  dreadful  person  who  exerts  a 
malign  influence  on  the  child,  sending  him,  for 
example,  his  pains  in  the  stomach.  In  other  cases  it 
is  a  fairy-like  being  who  is  created  into  a  mighty 
benefactor,  and  half-worshipped  and  prayed  to  in 
childish  fashion. 

Even  when  religious  instruction  supplies  the  form 
of  the  supernatural  being  the  young  thinker  deals  with 
this  in  his  own  original  way.  He  has  to  understand 
the  mysteries  of  God,  Satan  and  the  rest,  and  he  can 
only  understand  them  by  shedding  on  them  the  light 
of  homely  terrestrial  facts.  Hence  the  undisguised 
materialism  of  the  child's  theology.  According  to 
Dr.  Stanley  Hall's  inquiries  into  the  thoughts  of 
American  children,  God  is  apt  to  be  imaged  as  a 
big,  very  strong  man  or  giant.  One  child  thought  of 
him  as  a  huge  being  with  limbs  spread  all  over  the 
sky ;  another,  as  so  tall  that  he  could  stand  with  one 
foot  on  the  ground,  and  touch  the  clouds.  He  is 
commonly  supposed,  in  conformity  with  what  is  told 
him,  to  dwell  just  above  the  sky,  which  last,  as  we 
have  seen,  is  thought  of  as  a  dividing  floor,  through 


First  Thoughts:  {b)  Self  and  other  Mysteries.  79 

the  chinks  of  which  we  get  glimmerings  of  the  glory 
of  the  heaven  above.  But  some  children  show  more 
of  their  own  thought  in  localising  the  Deity,  placing 
him,  for  example,  in  one  of  the  stars,  or  the  moon,  or 
lower  down  "  upon  the  hill  ". 

Differences  in  childish  feeling,  as  well  as  in  in- 
telligence, reflect  themselves  in  the  first  ideas  about 
the  divine  dwelling-place.  It  seems  commonly  to  be 
conceived  of  as  a  grand  house  or  mansion.  While, 
however,  some  children  deck  it  out  with  all  manner 
of  lovely  things,  including  a  park,  flowers,  and 
birds,  others  give  it  a  homelier  character,  thinking, 
for  example,  of  doors  and  possible  draughts,  like  a 
little  girl  who  asked  God  "  to  mind  and  shut  the 
door,  because  he  {i.e.,  grandpapa  who  had  just 
died)  can't  stand  the  draughts ".  Some  children, 
too,  of  a  less  exuberant  fancy  are  disposed  to  think 
of  heaven  as  by  no  means  so  satisfyingly  lovely, 
and  rather  to  shrink  from  a  long  wearisome  stay 
in  it. 

While  thus  relegated  to  the  sublime  regions  of  the 
sky  God  is  supposed  to  be  doing  things,  and  of  course 
doing  them  for  us,  sending  down  rain  and  so  forth. 
What  seems  to  impress  children  most,  especially 
boys,  in  the  traditional  account  of  God  is  his  power 
of  making  things.  He  is  emphatically  the  artificer, 
the  "  demiurgos,"  who  not  only  has  made  the  world, 
the  stars,  etc.,  but  is  still  kept  actively  employed  by 
human  needs.  According  to  some  of  the  American 
school-children  he  fabricates  all  sorts  of  things  from 
babies  to  money,  and  the  angels  work  for  him.  The 
boy  has  a  great  admiration  for  the  maker,  and  one 
small    English   boy   once   expressed   this   oddly   by 


8o  Children's  Ways. 

asking  his  mother  whether  a  group  of  working  men 
returning  from  their  work  were  "  gods  ". 

This  admiration  for  superior  power  and  skill  favours 
the  idea  of  God's  omnipotence.  This  is  amply  illus- 
trated in  children's  spontaneous  prayers,  which  ask  for 
things,  from  fine  weather  on  a  coming  holiday  to  a 
baby  with  curly  hair  and  other  lovely  attributes,  with 
all  a  child's  naive  faith.  Yet  a  critical  attitude  will 
sometimes  be  taken  up  towards  this  mystery  of 
unlimited  power.  The  more  logical  and  speculative 
sort  of  child  will  now  and  then  put  a  sceptical 
question  to  his  elders  on  this  subject  A  boy  of 
eight  turned  over  the  problem  whether  God  could 
beat  him  in  a  foot-race  if  he  were  starter  and  judge 
and  refused  to  let  God  start  till  he  had  reached  the 
goal ;  and  he  actually  measured  out  the  racecourse 
on  a  garden  path  and  went  through  the  part  of 
running,  afterwards  sitting  down  and  giving  God 
time  to  run,  and  then  pondering  the  possibility  of  his 
beating  him. 

The  idea  of  God's  omniscience,  too,  may  come 
readily  enough  to  a  child  accustomed  to  look  up  ad- 
miringly to  the  boundless  knowledge  of  some  human 
authority,  say  a  clergyman.  Yet  I  know  of  cases  where 
the  dogma  of  God's  infinite  knowledge  provoked  in 
the  child's  mind  a  sceptical  attitude.  One  little  fellow 
remarked  on  this  subject  rather  profanely  :  "  I  know 
a  'ickle  more  than  Kitty,  and  you  know  a  'ickle  more 
than  me  ;  and  God  knows  a  'ickle  more  than  you,  I 
s'pose  ;  then  he  can't  know  so  very  much  after  all  ". 

Another  of  the  divine  attributes  does  undoubtedly 
shock  the  child's  intelligence.  While  he  is  told  that 
God  has  a  special  abode  in  heaven,  he  is  told  also 


First  Thoughts :  (^)  Self  and  other  Mysteries.  8 1 

that  he  is  here,  there  and  everywhere,  and  can  see 
everything.  More  particularly  the  idea  of  being  always 
watched  is,  I  think,  repugnant  to  sensitive  and  high- 
spirited  children.  An  American  lady,  Miss  Shinn, 
speaks  of  a  little  girl,  who,  on  learning  that  she  was 
under  this  constant  surveillance,  declared  that  she 
"would  not  be  so  tagged".  An  English  boy  of 
three,  on  being  informed  by  his  older  sister  that  God 
can  see  and  watch  us  while  we  cannot  see  him, 
thought  awhile,  and  then  in  an  apologetic  tone  said  : 
"  I'm  very  sorry,  dear,  I  can't  (b)elieve  you  ". 

When  the  idea  is  accepted  odd  devices  are  excogi- 
tated by  the  active  little  brain  for  making  it  intel- 
ligible. Thus  one  child  thought  of  God  as  a  very 
small  person  who  could  easily  pass  through  the  key- 
hole. The  opposite  idea  of  God's  huge  framework, 
illustrated  above,  is  probably  but  another  attempt  to 
figure  the  conception  of  omnipresence.  Curious  con- 
clusions too  are  sometimes  drawn  from  the  supposi- 
tion. Thus  a  little  girl  of  three  years  and  nine 
months  one  day  said  to  her  mother  in  the  abrupt 
childish  manner :  "  Mr.  C.  (a  gentleman  she  had 
known  who  had  just  died)  is  in  this  room ".  Her 
mother,  naturally  a  good  deal  startled,  answered : 
"Oh,  no!"  Whereupon  the  child  resumed:  "Yes, 
he  is.  You  told  me  he  is  with  God,  and  you  told 
me  God  was  everywhere ;  so  as  Mr.  C.  is  with  God, 
he  must  be  in  this  room." 

It  might  easily  be  supposed  that  the  child's  readi- 
ness to  pray  to  God  is  inconsistent  with  what  has 
just  been  said.  Yet  I  think  there  is  no  real  incon- 
sistency. Children's  idea  of  prayer  appears  com- 
monly to  be  that  of  sending  a  message  to  some  one 


82  Children's  Ways, 

at  a  distance.  The  epistolary  manner  noticeable  in 
many  prayers,  especially  at  the  beginning  and  the 
ending,  seems  to  illustrate  this.  The  mysterious 
whispering  in  which  a  prayer  is  often  conveyed  is,  I 
suspect,  supposed  in  some  inscrutable  fashion  known 
only  to  the  child  to  transmit  itself  to  the  divine 
ear. 

Of  the  child's  belief  in  God's  goodness  it  is  need- 
less to  say  much.  For  these  little  worshippers  he  is 
emphatically  the  friend  in  need  who  is  just  as  ready 
as  he  is  able  to  help  them  out  of  every  manner  of 
difficulty,  and  who,  if  they  only  ask  prettily,  will  send 
them  all  the  nice  things  they  long  for.  Yet,  happy 
little  optimists  as  they  are  inclined  to  be,  they  will 
now  and  again  be  saddened  by  doubt,  and  wonder 
why  the  nice  things  asked  for  don't  come,  and  why 
the  dear  kind  God  allows  them  to  suffer  so  much. 

While  a  child  is  thus  apt  to  think  of  God  as  nicer 
than  the  nicest  gentleman  visitor  who  is  wont  to 
bring  toys  and  do  wondrous  things  for  his  delectation, 
he  commonly  imports  into  his  conception  a  touch  of 
human  caprice.  Fear  may  readily  suggest  to  a  child 
who  has  had  some  orthodox  instruction  that  the  wind 
howling  at  night  is  the  noise  of  God's  anger,  or  that 
the  thunder  is  due  to  a  sudden  determination  of  the 
Creator  to  shoot  him  dead.  The  sceptical  child, 
again,  who  is  by  no  means  so  rare,  may  early  begin 
to  wonder  how  God  can  be  so  good  and  yet  allow 
men  to  kill  animals,  and  allow  Satan  to  do  such  a 
lot  of  wicked  things. 

One  of  the  hardest  puzzles  set  to  a  child  by  the 
common  religious  instruction  is  the  doctrine  of  God's 
eternity.     The   idea   of  a   vast,  endless    **  for  ever," 


First  Thoughts:  (J?)  Self  and  other  Mysteries.   83 

whether  past  or  future,  seems  to  be  positively  over- 
whelming to  many  young  minds.  The  continual 
frustration  of  the  attempt  to  reach  a  resting-place  in 
a  beginning  or  an  end  may  bring  on  something  of 
mental  giddiness.  Hence  the  wearisome  perplexities 
of  the  first  thoughts  about  God's  past.  The  question, 
"  Who  made  God  ? "  seems  to  be  one  to  which  all 
inquiring  young  minds  are  led  at  a  certain  stage  of 
child-thought  When  told  that  God  has  always  been, 
unchanging,  and  knowing  no  youth,  he  wants  to  get 
behind  this  "  always  was,"  just  as  at  an  earlier  stage 
of  his  development  he  wanted  to  get  behind  the 
barrier  of  the  blue  hills. 

Other  mysteries  of  the  orthodox  faith  may  under- 
go a  characteristic  solution  in  the  hard-working  mind 
of  a  child.  A  friend  tells  me  that  when  a  child  he 
was  much  puzzled  by  the  doctrine  of  the  Trinity. 
He  happened  to  be  an  only  child,  and  so  he  was  led 
to  put  a  meaning  into  it  by  likening  it  to  his  own 
family  group,  in  which  the  Holy  Ghost  had,  rather 
oddly,  to  take  the  place  of  the  mother. 

Thoughtful  children  by  odd  processes  of  early 
logic  are  apt  when  interpreting  the  words  and  actions 
of  their  teachers  to  endow  God  with  surprising  attri- 
butes. For  example,  a  boy  of  four  asked  his  aunt 
one  Sunday  to  tell  him  why  God  was  so  fond  of 
three-penny  bits.  Asked  why  he  thought  God  had 
this  particular  liking,  he  explained  by  saying  that  he 
noticed  that  on  Sunday  morning  people  ask  for  a 
three-penny  bit  "  instead  of"  three  pennies,  and  that 
as  they  take  it  to  church  he  supposed  that  they  gave 
it  to  God. 

I  have   tried   to   show  that   the  more  thoughtful 


84  Children's  Ways. 

children  seek  to  put  meaning  into  the  communica- 
tions about  the  unseen  world  which  they  are  wont  to 
receive  from  their  elders.  Perhaps  these  elders  if 
they  knew  what  is  apt  to  go  on  in  a  child's  mind 
would  reconsider  some  of  the  answers  which  they 
give  to  the  little  questioner,  and  select  with  more 
care  the  truths  which,  as  they  flatter  themselves,  they 
are  making  so  plain  to  their  little  ones. 


CHAPTER  VIL 

THE  BATTLE  WITH  FEARS :  (a)  THE  ONSLAUGHT. 

It  is  often  asked  whether  children  have  as  lively, 
as  intense  feeh'ngs  as  their  elders.  Those  emotions  of 
childhood  which  are  wont  to  break  out  into  violent 
expression,  such  as  angry  disappointment  and  glad- 
ness, may  not,  it  is  said,  be  in  themselves  so  intense  as 
they  look.  In  order  to  get  more  data  for  settling  the 
question  we  must  try  to  reach  their  less  demonstrative 
feelings,  those  which  they  are  apt  to  hide  from  view 
out  of  shame,  or  some  other  impulse.  Of  these  none 
is  more  interesting  than  fear,  and  it  so  happens  that 
a  good  deal  of  inquiry  has  of  late  been  directed  to 
this  feeling. 

That  we  must  not  expect  too  much  knowledge 
here  seems  certain.  Fear  is  one  of  the  shyest  of 
the  young  feelings.  A  little  fellow  of  two  coming 
out  of  his  grandpapa's  house  one  evening  into  the 
darkness  with  his  mother,  asked  her:  "Would  you 
like  to  take  hold  of  my  hand,  mammy?"  His  father 
took  this  to  mean  the  beginning  of  boyish  determina- 
tion not  to  show  fear.  Still,  with  the  help  of  observa- 
tions of  parents,  and  later  confessions  and  descriptions 
of  childish  fear,  we  may  be  able  to  get  some  insight 
into  the  dark  subject. 

That  fear  is  one  of  the  characteristic  feelings  of 
children  needs,  one  supposes,  no  proving.     In  spite  of 


86  Children's  Ways. 

the  wonderful  stories  of  Horatio  Nelson,  and  of  their 
reflections  in  literature,  e.g.,  Mr.  Barrie's  "  Sentimental 
Tommy,"  I  entertain  the  gravest  doubts  as  to  the 
existence  of  a  perfectly  fearless  child.  Children  differ 
enormously,  and  the  same  child  differs  enormously  at 
different  times  in  the  intensity  of  his  fear,  but  they 
all  have  the  characteristic  disposition  to  fear.  It 
seems  to  belong  to  these  wee,  weakly  things,  brought 
face  to  face  with  a  new  strange  world,  to  tremble. 
They  are  naturally  timid,  as  all  that  is  weak  and 
ignorant  in  nature  is  apt  to  be  timid. 

I  have  said  that  fear  is  well  marked  in  the  child. 
Yet,  though  it  is  true  that  a  state  of  "  being  afraid  " 
when  fully  developed  shows  itself  by  unmistakable 
signs,  there  are  many  cases  where  it  is  by  no  means 
easy  to  say  whether  the  child  experiences  the  feeling. 
People  are  apt  to  think  that  every  time  a  child  starts 
it  is  feeling  afraid  of  something,  but  as  we  shall  pre- 
sently see,  being  startled  and  really  frightened  are 
two  experiences,  which,  though  closely  related,  must 
be  carefully  distinguished.  A  child  may,  further, 
show  a  sort  of  aesthetic  repugnance  to  certain  sounds, 
such  as  those  of  a  piano  ;  to  ugly  forms,  e.g.,  a  hunch- 
back figure  ;  to  particular  touches,  such  as  that  of  fur 
or  velvet,  without  having  the  full  experience  of  fear. 
Observers  of  children  are  by  no  means  careful  to  dis- 
tinguish true  fear  from  other  feelings  which  resemble  it 

Fear  proper  shows  itself  in  such  signs  as  these,  in 
the  stare,  the  grave  look,  the  movement  of  turning 
dway  and  hiding  the  face  against  the  nurse's  or 
mother's  shoulder,  or  of  covering  it  with  the  handa 
In  the  severer  forms,  known  as  terror,  it  leads  to 
trembling  and  to  wild  shrieking.     Changes  of  colour 


The  Battle  with  Fears  :   (a)  The  Onslaught.   87 

also  occur,  the  child's  face  turning  white,  or  possibly 
in  some  cases  red.  When  frightened  by  anything  an 
older  child  will  commonly  run  from  the  object  of  his 
fear,  though  the  violence  of  the  feeling  may  some- 
times paralyse  the  limbs  and  chain  the  would-be 
fugitive  to  the  spot.  This  often  happens,  I  fancy, 
with  a  sudden  oncoming  of  dread  at  discovering  one- 
self alone  in  the  dark. 


The  Battery  of  Sounds. 

As  is  well  known,  sudden  and  loud  sounds,  such  as 
that  of  a  door  banging,  will  give  a  shock  to  an  infant 
in  the  first  weeks  of  life,  which  though  not  amounting 
to  fear  is  its  progenitor.  A  clearer  manifestation 
occurs  when  a  new  and  unfamiliar  sound  calls  forth 
the  grave  look,  the  trembling  lip,  and  possibly  the  fit 
of  crying.  Darwin  noticed  these  in  one  of  his  own 
boys  at  the  age  of  four  and  a  half  months,  when  he 
produced  the  new  sound  of  a  loud  snoring. 

It  is  not  every  new  sound  which  is  thus  discon- 
certing to  the  little  stranger.  Sudden  sharp  sounds 
of  any  kind  seem  to  be  especially  disliked,  as  those  of 
a  dog's  bark.  A  little  girl  burst  out  crying  on  first 
hearing  the  sound  of  a  baby  rattle  ;  and  she  did  the 
same  two  months  later  on  accidentally  ringing  a  hand 
bell.  Children  often  show  curious  caprices  in  their 
objections  to  sounds.  Thus  a  little  girl  when  taken 
into  the  country  at  the  age  of  nine  months  took  a 
liking  to  most  of  the  animals  she  saw,  but  on  hearing 
the  bleating  of  the  sheep  showed  a  distinct  germ  of 
fear  by  sheltering  herself  against  her  nurse's  shoulder. 

So  disturbing   are   new   sounds  apt  to  be  to  the 


88  Children's  Ways. 

young  child  that  even  musical  ones  are  often  disliked 
at  first.  The  first  hearing  of  the  tones  of  a  piano  has 
upset  the  comfort  of  many  a  child.  A  child  of  five 
and  a  half  months  conceived  a  kind  of  horror  for 
a  banjo,  and  screamed  if  it  were  played  or  only 
touched. 

Animals  may  show  a  similar  dread  of  musical 
sounds.  I  took  a  young  cat  of  about  eight  weeks  into 
my  lap  and  struck  some  chords  not  loudly  on  the 
piano.  It  got  up,  moved  uneasily  from  side  to  side, 
then  bolted  to  a  corner  of  the  room  and  seemed  to 
try  to  get  up  the  walls.  Many  dogs,  too,  certainly 
appear  to  be  put  out,  if  not  to  be  made  afraid,  on 
hearing  the  music  of  a  brass  band. 

Fear  of  nature's  great  sounds,  more  especially 
the  wind  and  thunder,  which  is  common  among  older 
children,  owes  its  intensity  not  merely  to  their 
volume,  which  seems  to  surround  and  crush,  but  also 
to  the  mystery  of  their  origin.  We  should  remember 
too  that  sounds  are,  for  the  child  still  more  than  for 
the  adult,  expressive  of  feeling  and  intention.  Hence 
religious  ideas  readily  graft  themselves  on  to  the 
noisy  utterances  of  wind  and  thunder.  Wind  is  con- 
ceived of,  for  example,  as  the  blowing  of  God  when 
angry,  and  thunder,  as  we  have  seen,  as  his  snoring, 
and  so  forth. 

I  am  far  from  saying  that  all  children  manifest 
this  fear  of  sounds.  Many  babies  welcome  the  new 
and  beautiful  sounds  of  music  with  a  joyous  greeting. 
Even  the  awful  thunder-storm  may  gladly  excite  and 
not  frighten.  Children  will  sometimes  get  through 
the  first  months  without  this  fear,  and  then  develop  it 
as  late  as  the  second  year. 


The  Battle  with  Fears  :  {a)  The  Onslaught.    89 

I  think,  then,  that  in  these  disturbing  effects  of 
sound  we  have  to  do  with  something  more  than  a 
mere  nervous  shock  or  a  start.  They  involve  a  rudi- 
ment of  the  feeling  of  uneasiness  at  what  is  unex- 
pected and  disturbing,  and  so  may  be  said  to  be  the 
beginning  of  true  childish  fears.  This  element  of 
anxiety  becomes  more  clearly  marked  where  the 
sound  is  not  only  disturbing  but  mysterious,  as  when 
a  toy  emits  a  sound,  or  water  produces  a  rushing 
noise  in  some  hidden  pipe. 

There  is  another  kind  of  disturbance  which  shows 
itself  also  in  the  first  year,  and  has  a  certain  analogy  to 
the  discomposing  effect  of  sound.  This  is  the  feeling 
of  bodily  insecurity  which  appears  very  early  when 
the  child  is  awkwardly  carried,  or  when  in  dandling 
it,  it  is  let  down  back-foremost.  One  child  in  her  fifth 
month  was  observed  when  carried  to  hold  on  to  the 
nurse's  dress  as  if  for  safety.  And  it  has  been  noticed 
by  more  than  one  observer  that  on  dandling  a  baby 
up  and  down  in  one's  arms,  it  will  on  descending, 
that  is  when  the  support  of  the  arms  is  being  with- 
drawn, show  signs  of  discontent  in  struggling  move- 
ments. This  is  sometimes  regarded  as  an  inherited 
fear  ;  yet  it  seems  possible  that,  like  the  jarring  effect 
of  noise  on  the  young  nerves,  it  is  the  result  of  a  rude 
disturbance.  A  child  accustomed  to  the  support  of 
its  cradle,  the  floor,  or  somebody's  lap,  might  be 
expected  to  be  put  out  when  the  customary  support 
is  withdrawn  wholly  or  partially.  The  sense  of 
equilibrium  is  disturbed  in  this  case. 

Other  senses,  more  particularly  that  of  touch,  may 
bring  their  disturbing  elements,  too.  Many  children 
have  a  strong  repugnance  to  cold  clammy  things,  such 
7 


90  Children's  Ways. 

as  a  cold  moist  hand,  and  what  seems  stranger,  to  the 
touch  of  something  that  seems  altogether  so  likable  as 
fur.  Whether  the  common  dislike  of  children  to  water 
has  anything  to  do  with  its  soft  yieldingness  to  touch 
I  cannot  say.  This  whole  class  of  early  repugnances 
to  certain  sensations  seems  to  stand  on  the  confines 
between  mere  dislikes  and  fears,  properly  so  called. 
A  child  may  very  much  dislike  touching  fur  without 
being  in  the  strict  sense  afraid  of  it,  though  the  dislike 
may  readily  develop  into  a  true  fear. 

The  Alarmed  Sentinel. 

We  may  now  pass  to  the  disconcerting  and 
alarming  effects  to  which  a  child  is  exposed  through 
his  sense  of  sight.  This,  as  we  know,  is  the  intel- 
lectual sense,  the  sentinel  that  guards  the  body, 
keeping  a  look-out  for  what  is  afar  as  for  what  is 
anear.  The  uneasiness  which  a  child  experiences  at 
seeing  things  is  not,  like  the  uneasiness  at  sounds,  a 
mere  effect  of  violent  sensation  ;  it  arises  much  more 
from  a  perception  of  something  menacing. 

Among  the  earliest  alarmers  of  sight  may  be 
mentioned  the  appearance  of  something  new  and 
strange,  especially  when  it  involves  a  sudden  aboli- 
tion of  customary  arrangements.  Although  we  are 
wont  to  think  of  children  as  loving  and  delighting  in 
what  is  new,  we  must  not  forget  that  it  may  also 
trouble  and  alarm.  This  feeling  of  uneasiness  and 
apparently  of  insecurity  in  presence  of  changed  sur- 
roundings shows  itself  as  soon  as  a  child  has  begun 
to  grow  used  or  accustomed  to  a  particular  state  of 
things. 


The  Battle  with  Fears  :  (a)  The  Onslaught.  91 

Among  the  more  disconcerting  effects  of  a  rude 
departure  from  the  customary,  is  that  of  change  of 
place.  When  once  an  infant  has  grown  accustomed 
to  a  certain  room  it  is  apt  to  find  a  new  one  strange, 
and  will  eye  its  features  with  a  perceptibly  anxious 
look.  This  sense  of  strangeness  in  places  sometimes 
appears  very  early.  A  little  girl  on  being  taken  at 
the  age  of  four  months  into  a  new  nursery,  "  looked 
all  round  and  then  burst  out  crying".  Some  children 
retain  this  feeling  of  uneasiness  up  to  the  age  of 
three  years  and  later.  Here,  again,  clearly  marked 
differences  among  children  disclose  themselves.  On 
entering  an  unfamiliar  room  a  child  may  have  his 
curiosity  excited,  or  may  be  amused  by  the  odd  look 
of  things,  so  that  the  fear-impulse  is  kept  under  by 
other  and  pleasanter  ones. 

What  applies  to  places  applies  also  to  persons. 
A  child  may  be  said  to  combine  the  attachment  of 
the  dog  to  persons  with  that  of  the  cat  to  localities. 
Any  sudden  change  of  the  customary  human  sur- 
roundings, for  example,  the  arrival  of  a  stranger  on 
the  scene,  is  apt  to  trouble  him. 

During  the  first  three  months,  there  is  no  distinct 
manifestation  of  a  fear  of  strangers.  It  is  only  later, 
when  recurring  forms  have  grown  familiar,  that  the 
approach  of  a  stranger,  especially  if  accompanied  by 
a  proposal  to  take  the  child,  calls  forth  clear  signs  of 
displeasure  and  the  shrinking  away  of  fear.  Professor 
Preyer  gives  between  six  and  seven  months  as  the 
date  at  which  his  boy  began  to  cry  at  the  sight  of  a 
strange  face. 

Here,  too,  curious  differences  soon  begin  to  dis- 
close themselves,  some  children  showing  themselves 


92  Children's  Ways. 

more  hospitable  than  others.  It  would  be  curious  to 
compare  the  ages  at  which  children  begin  to  take 
kindly  to  new  faces.  Professor  Preyer  gives  nineteen 
months  as  the  date  at  which  his  boy  surmounted  his 
timidity. 

One  strange  variety  of  the  fear  of  strangers  is  the 
uneasiness  shown  in  presence  of  some  one  who  is 
only  partially  recognisable.  One  little  boy  of  eight 
months  moaned  in  a  curious  way  when  his  nurse 
returned  home  after  a  fortnight's  holiday.  Another 
boy  of  about  ten  months  is  said  to  have  shown  a 
marked  shrinking  from  an  uncle  who  strongly  re- 
sembled his  father.  Such  facts,  taken  with  the 
familiar  one  that  children  are  apt  to  be  frightened  at 
the  sight  of  a  parent  partially  disguised,  suggest  that 
half-stranger  half-friend  may  be  for  a  child's  mind 
worse  than  altogether  a  stranger. 

The  uneasiness  which  comes  from  a  sense  of  being 
in  a  new  room  or  face  to  face  with  a  stranger  may 
perhaps  be  described  as  a  feeling  of  what  the  Germans 
call  the  "  unhomely  ".  The  little  traveller  has  lost 
his  bearings,  and  he  begins  to  feel  that  he  himself  is 
lost.  This  effect  of  homelessness  is,  of  course,  most 
marked  when  a  child  finds  himself  in  a  strange  place. 
Much  of  the  acuter  fear  of  children  probably  has  in  it 
something  of  this  dizzy  sickening  sense  of  being  lost. 
A  little  girl  between  the  ages  of  seven  and  ten  used  to 
wake  up  in  a  fright  crying  loudly  because  she  could 
not  think  where  she  was.  Many  a  child  when  ex- 
ploring a  new  and  dark  room,  or  still  more  venture- 
somely wandering  alone  out  of  doors,  has  suddenly 
woke  up  to  the  strange  homeless  look  of  things.  I 
once   saw  a    wee    girl    at    a   children's   party  who 


TJie  Battle  with  Fears  :   (a)  The  Onslaught.  93 

appeared  to  enjoy  herself  well  enough  up  to  a  certain 
point,  but  was  then  suddenly  seized  by  this  sense  of 
being  lost  in  a  new  room  among  new  faces,  so  that 
all  her  older  sister's  attempts  to  reassure  her  failed  to 
stay  the  paroxysm  of  grief  and  terror. 

We  may  see  a  measure  of  this  same  distrust  of  the 
new,  this  same  clinging  to  the  homely,  in  many  of 
children's  lesser  fears,  as,  for  example,  that  of  new 
clothes.  An  infant  has  been  known  to  break  out 
into  tears  at  the  sight  of  a  new  dress  on  its  mother, 
though  the  colour  and  pattern  had,  one  would 
have  supposed,  nothing  alarming.  The  fear  of  black 
clothes,  of  which  there  are  many  known  examples, 
probably  includes  further  a  special  dislike  for  this 
colour. 

Here,  again,  we  may  see  two  opposed  impulses 
at  work,  of  which  either  one  or  the  other  may  be 
uppermost  in  different  children,  or  at  different  times 
in  the  same  child.  The  dread  of  new  clothes  has  its 
natural  antagonist  in  the  love  of  new  clothes,  which  is 
often  supported  in  children  of  a  "subjective"  turn  by 
a  feeling  of  something  like  disgrace  at  having  to  go 
on  wearing  the  same  clothes  so  long.  Sometimes  the 
love  of  novelty  becomes  a  passion.  The  boy  Alfred 
de  Musset  at  the  age  of  four,  watching  his  mother 
fitting  on  his  feet  a  pair  of  pretty  red  shoes,  ex- 
claimed :  "  Depeche  toi,  maman,  mes  souliers  neufs 
vont  devenir  vieux  ". 

Some  other  fears  closely  resemble  that  of  new 
clothes  insomuch  as  they  involve  an  unpleasant  trans- 
formation of  a  familiar  object,  the  human  figure,  the 
mainstay  of  a  child's  trust.  Possibly  the  alarming 
effect  of  making  faces,  which  is  said  to  disturb  a  child 


94  Children's  Ways. 

within  the  first  three  months,  illustrates  the  effect  of 
shock  at  the  spoiling  of  what  is  getting  familiar  and 
liked.  The  donning  of  a  pair  of  dark  spectacles,  by- 
extinguishing  the  focus  of  childish  interest,  the  eye, 
will  produce  a  like  effect  of  the  uncanny.  Children 
show  a  similar  dislike  and  fear  at  the  sight  of  an 
ugly  doll  with  features  greatly  distorted  from  the 
familiar  pattern. 

The  fear  of  certain  big  objects  contains,  I  think, 
the  germ  of  this  feeling  of  uneasiness  in  the  presence 
of  strange  surroundings.  One  of  the  best  illustrations 
of  this  is  produced  by  a  first  sight  of  the  sea.  Some 
children  clearly  show  signs  of  alarm,  nestling  towards 
their  nurses  when  they  are  carried  near  the  edge  of  the 
water.  Yet  here,  again,  the  behaviour  of  the  childish 
mind  varies  greatly.  A  little  boy  who  first  saw  the 
sea  at  the  age  of  thirteen  months  exhibited  signs  not 
of  fear  but  of  wondering  delight,  prettily  stretching 
out  his  tiny  hands  towards  it  as  if  wanting  to  go  to  it. 
I  am  disposed  to  think  that  imaginative  children, 
whose  minds  take  in  something  of  the  bigness  of  the 
sea,  are  more  susceptible  of  this  variety  of  fear.  This 
conjecture  is  borne  out  by  the  case  of  two  sisters,  of 
whom  one,  an  imaginative  child,  had  not  even  at  the 
age  of  six  got  over  her  fear  of  going  into  the  sea, 
whereas  the  sister,  who  was  comparatively  unimagin- 
ative, was  perfectly  fearless.  The  supposition  finds  a 
further  confirmation  in  the  descriptions  given  by  im- 
aginative writers  of  their  early  impressions  of  the  sea, 
for  example,  that  of  M.  Pierre  Loti  in  his  volume  Le 
Roman  (Vun  Enfant. 

The   fear   of  an   eclipse   of  the   moon   and  other 
celestial  phenomena,  owes  something  of  its  force  and 


The  Battle  with  Fears  :  (a)  The  Onslaught.  95 

persistence  to  their  unknown  and  inaccessible  char- 
acter. A  cliild  is  easily  annoyed  at  that  great  white 
thing,  which  seems  like  a  human  face  to  look  down 
on  him,  and  which  never  comes  a  step  nearer  to  let 
him  know  what  it  really  is.  It  may  be  conjectured 
too  that  a  child's  fear  of  clouds,  when  they  take  on 
uncanny  forms,  is  supported  by  their  inaccessibility ; 
for  he  cannot  get  near  them  and  touch  them.  It 
seems,  however,  according  to  some  recent  researches 
in  America,  that  children's  fear  of  celestial  bodies, 
especially  the  moon  and  clouds,  is  connected  with  the 
thought  that  they  may  fall  on  them.  The  idea  of 
these  strange-looking  objects  above  the  head,  having 
no  visible  support,  and  often  taking  on  a  threatening 
mien,  may  well  give  rise  to  fear  in  a  child's  breast 
akin  to  the  superstitious  fear  of  the  savage. 

Self-moving  objects,  which  are  not  manifestly  living 
things,  are  apt  to  excite  a  feeling  of  alarm  in  children, 
as  indeed  to  some  extent  in  the  more  intelligent 
animals.  Just  as  a  dog  will  run  away  from  a  leaf 
whirled  about  by  the  wind,  so  children  are  apt  to  be 
terrified  by  the  strange  and  quite  irregular  behaviour 
of  a  feather  as  it  glides  along  the  floor  or  lifts  itself 
into  the  air.  A  girl  of  three,  who  happened  to  pull 
a  feather  out  of  her  mother's  eider-down  quilt,  was  so 
alarmed  at  seeing  it  float  in  the  air  that  she  would 
not  come  near  the  bed  for  days  afterwards.  Shrewd 
nurses  know  of  this  weakness,  and  have  been  able 
effectually  to  keep  a  child  in  a  room  by  putting 
a  feather  in  the  keyhole.  The  fear  here  seems  to  be 
of  something  which  simulates  life  and  yet  is  not  recog- 
nisable as  a  familiar  living  form.  It  was,  I  suppose, 
the  same  uncanny  suggestion  of  life  which  made  a 


96  Children's  Ways. 

child  of  four  afraid  at  the  sight  of  a  leaf  floating  on 
the  water  of  the  bath-tub.  Fear  of  feathers  is,  I 
believe,  known  among  the  superstitions  of  adults. 

This  simulation  of  life  by  what  is  perceived  to 
be  not  alive  probably  takes  part  in  other  forms  of 
childish  dread.  Toys  which  take  on  too  impudently 
the  appearance  of  life  may  excite  fear,  as,  for  example, 
a  toy  cow  which  "  moved  realistically  when  it  reared 
its  head,"  a  combination  which  completely  scared  its 
possessor,  a  boy  about  the  age  of  one  and  a  half 
years.  A  child  can  itself  make  its  toy  alive,  and  so 
does  not  want  the  toy-maker  to  do  so. 

The  fear  of  shadows,  which  appears  among  children 
as  among  superstitious  adults,  seems  to  arise  partly 
from  their  blackness  and  eerie  forms,  partly  from  their 
uncanny  movements  and  changes  of  form.  Some  of 
us  can  recall  with  R.  L.  Stevenson  the  childish  horror 
of  going  up  a  staircase  to  bed  when, 

...  all  round  the  candle  the  crooked  shadows  come, 
And  go  marching  along  up  the  stair. 

One's  own  shadow  is  worst  of  all,  doggedly  pursuing, 
horribly  close  at  every  movement,  undergoing  all 
manner  of  ugly  and  weird  transformations. 


CHAPTER  VIII. 

THE  BATTLE  WITH  FEARS  {Continued). 

The  Assault  of  the  Beasts. 

There  are  two  varieties  of  children's  fears  so  prominent 
and  so  important  that  it  seems  worth  while  to  deal 
with  them  separately.  These  are  the  dread  of  animals 
and  of  the  dark. 

It  may  well  seem  strange  that  the  creatures  which 
are  to  become  the  companions  and  playmates  of  chil- 
dren, and  one  of  the  chief  sources  of  their  happiness, 
should  cause  so  much  alarm  when  they  first  come  on 
the  scene.  Yet  so  it  is.  Many  children,  at  least,  are 
at  first  terribly  put  out  by  quite  harmless  members  of 
the  animal  family. 

In  some  cases,  no  doubt,  as  when  a  child  takes  a 
strong  dislike  to  a  dog  after  having  been  alarmed  at 
its  barking,  we  have  to  do  with  the  disturbing  effect  of 
sound  merely.  Fear  here  takes  its  rise  in  the  experi- 
ence of  shock.  In  other  cases  we  have  to  do  rather 
with  a  sort  of  aesthetic  dislike  to  what  is  disagreeable 
and  ugly  than  with  a  true  fear.  Children  sometimes 
appear  to  feel  a  repugnance  to  a  black  sheep  or  other 
animal  just  because  they  dislike  black  objects,  though 
the  feeling  may  not  amount  to  fear  properly  so  called. 

Yet  allowing  for  these  sources  of  repugnance,  it 
seems  probable  that  many  children  from  about  two 
or  three  onwards  manifest  something  indistinguishable 


98  Children's  Ways. 

from  fear  at  the  first  sight  of  certain  animals.  The 
directions  of  this  childish  fear  vary  greatly.  Darwin's 
boy  when  taken  to  the  Zoological  Gardens  at  the  age  of 
two  years  three  months  showed  a  fear  of  the  big  caged 
animals  whose  forms  were  strange  to  him,  such,  e.g.,  as 
the  lion  and  the  tiger.  Some  children  have  shown 
fear  on  seeing  a  tame  bear,  others  have  selected  the 
cow  as  their  pet  dread,  others  the  butting  ram,  and  so 
forth.  Nor  do  they  confine  their  aversions  to  the 
bigger  animals.  Snakes,  caterpillars,  worms,  small 
birds  such  as  sparrows,  spiders  and  even  moths  have 
looked  alarming  enough  to  throw  a  child  into  a  state 
of  terror. 

It  is  sometimes  thought  that  these  early  fears  of 
animals  are  inherited  from  remote  ancestors  to  whom 
many  wild  animals  were  really  dangerous.  But  I  do 
not  think  that  this  has  been  proven  The  variety  of 
these  childish  recoilings,  and  the  fact  that  they  seem 
to  be  just  as  often  from  small  harmless  creatures  as 
from  big  and  mighty  ones,  suggest  that  other  causes 
are  at  work  here.  We  may  indeed  suppose  that  a 
child's  nervous  system  has  been  so  put  together  and 
poised  that  it  very  readily  responds  to  the  impression 
of  strange  animal  forms  by  a  tremor.  Special  aspects 
of  the  unfamiliar  animal,  aided  by  special  character- 
istics of  its  sounds,  probably  determine  the  direc- 
tions of  this  tremor. 

In  many  cases,  I  think,  the  mere  bigness  of  an 
animal,  aided  by  the  uncanny  look  which  often 
comes  from  an  apparent  distortion  of  the  familiar 
human  face,  may  account  for  some  of  these  early 
fears.  In  other  cases  we  can  see  that  it  is  the 
suggestion   of  attack   which   alarms.      This   applies 


The  Battle  with  Fears  :    (a)  The  Onslaught.   99 

pretty  certainly  to  the  butting  ram,  and  may  apply  to 
pigeons  and  other  birds  whose  pecking  movements 
readily  appear  to  a  child's  mind  a  kind  of  attack. 
And  this  su[)plies  an  explanation  of  the  fear  of  one 
boy  of  two  years  three  months  at  the  sight  of  pigs 
when  sucking  ;  for,  as  the  child  let  out  afterwards,  he 
thought  they  were  biting  their  mother.  The  unex- 
pectedness of  the  animal's  movements  too,  especially 
when,  as  in  the  case  of  birds,  mice,  spiders,  they  are  rapid, 
might  excite  uneasiness.  In  other  cases  it  is  some- 
thing uncanny  in  the  movement  which  excites  fear, 
as  when  one  child  was  frightened  at  seeing  a  cat's  tail 
move  when  the  animal  was  asleep.  The  apparent  fear 
of  worms  and  caterpillars  in  some  children  may  be 
explained  in  this  way,  though  associations  of  dis- 
agreeable touch  probably  assist  here.  In  the  case  of 
many  of  the  smaller  animals,  e.g.,  small  birds,  mice,  and 
even  insects  when  they  come  too  near,  the  fear  may 
not  improbably  have  its  source  in  a  vague  apprehension 
of  invasion. 

These  shrinkings  from  animals  are  among  the  most 
capricious-looking  of  all  childish  fears.  Many  robust 
children  with  hardy  nerves  know  little  or  nothing  of 
them.  Here,  too,  as  in  the  case  of  new  things  gener- 
ally, the  painfulness  of  fear  is  opposed  and  may  be 
overcome  by  the  pleasure  of  watching  and  by  the 
deeper  pleasure  of  "  making  friends ".  Quite  tiny 
children,  on  first  seeing  ducks  and  other  animals,  so 
far  from  being  alarmed,  will  run  after  the  pretty 
creatures  to  make  pets  of  them.  Nothing  perhaps  is 
prettier  in  child-life  than  the  pose  and  look  of  one  of 
these  defenceless  youngsters  when  he  is  making  a 
brave  effort  to  get  the  better  of  his  fear  at  the  ap- 


loo  Children's  Ways. 

proach  of  a  strange  big  dog  and  to  proffer  friendship 
to  the  shaggy  monster.  The  perfect  love  which  lies 
at  the  bottom  of  children's  hearts  towards  their 
animal  kinsfolk  soon  casts  out  fear.  And  when 
once  the  reconciliation  has  been  effected  it  will  take 
a  good  deal  of  harsh  experience  to  make  the  child 
ever  again  entertain  the  thought  of  danger. 

The  Night  Attack. 

Fear  of  the  dark,  and  especially  of  being  alone  in 
the  dark,  which  includes  not  only  the  nocturnal  dread 
of  the  dark  bedroom,  but  that  of  closets,  caves,  woods, 
and  other  gloomy  places,  is  no  doubt  very  common 
among  children.  It  does  not  show  itself  in  the  early 
months.  A  baby  of  three  or  four  months  if  ac- 
customed to  a  light  may  no  doubt  be  upset  at  being 
deprived  of  it ;  but  this  is  some  way  from  a  dread  of 
the  dark.  This  presupposes  a  certain  development 
of  the  mind,  and  more  particularly  what  we  call  im- 
agination. It  is  said  by  Dr.  Stanley  Hall  to  attain 
its  greatest  strength  about  the  age  of  five  to  seven, 
when  images  of  things  are  known  to  be  vivid. 

So  far  as  we  can  understand  it  the  fear  of  the  dark 
is  rarely  of  the  darkness  as  such.  The  blackness 
present  to  the  eye  in  a  dark  room  does  no  doubt  en- 
compass us  and  seem  to  close  in  upon  and  threaten 
to  stifle  us.  We  know,  too,  that  children  sometimes 
show  fear  of  mists,  and  that  many  are  haunted  by  the 
idea  of  the  stifling  grave.  Hence,  it  is  not  improbable 
that  children  seized  by  the  common  terror  and  dizzi- 
ness on  suddenly  waking  may  feel  the  darkness  as 
something  oppressive.     This  is  borne  out  by  the  fact 


The  Battle  with  Fears  :   (a)  The  Onslaught.   loi 

that  a  little  boy  on  surmounting  his  dread  told  his 
father  that  he  used  to  think  the  dark  "  a  great  large 
live  thing  the  colour  of  black  ".  A  child  can  easily 
make  a  substantial  thing  out  of  the  dark,  as  he  can 
out  of  a  shadow. 

Yet  in  most,  if  not  all,  cases  imagination  is  active 
here.  The  darkness  itself  offers  points  for  the  play 
of  imagination.  Owing  to  the  activity  of  the  retina, 
which  goes  on  even  when  no  light  excites  it,  brighter 
spots  are  apt  to  stand  out  from  the  black  background, 
to  take  form  and  to  move  ;  and  all  this  supplies  food 
to  a  child's  fancy.  I  suspect  that  the  alarming  eyes 
of  people  and  animals  which  children  are  apt  to  see 
in  the  dark  receive  their  explanation  in  this  way.  Of 
course  these  sources  of  uneasiness  grow  more  pro- 
nounced when  a  child  is  out  of  health  and  his  nervous 
tone  falls  low.  Even  older  people  who  have  this  fear 
describe  the  experience  as  seeing  shadowy  flitting 
forms,  and  this  suggests  that  the  activity  of  that 
wonderful  little  structure  the  retina  is  at  the  bottom 
of  it  The  same  thing  seems  to  be  borne  out  by  the 
common  dread  in  the  dark  o{  black  forms,  e.g.,  a  black 
coach  with  headless  coachman  dressed  in  black. 
A  girl  of  nineteen  remembers  that  when  a  child  she 
seemed  on  going  to  bed  to  see  little  black  figures 
jumping  about  between  the  ceiling  and  the  bed. 

The  more  familiar  forms  of  a  dread  of  the  dark  are 
sustained  by  images  of  threatening  creatures  which  lie 
hidden  in  the  blackness  or  half  betray  their  presence 
in  the  way  just  indicated.  These  images  are  in  many 
cases  the  revival  of  those  acquired  from  the  ex- 
periences of  the  day,  and  from  storyland.  The 
fears  of  the  day  live  on  undisturbed  in  the  dark  hours 


I02  Children's  Ways. 

of  night.  The  dog  that  has  frightened  a  child  will, 
when  he  goes  to  bed,  be  projected  into  the  surround- 
ing blackness.  Any  shock  in  the  waking  hours  may  in 
this  way  give  rise  to  a  more  or  less  permanent  fear  of 
being  alone  in  a  dark  place.  In  not  a  few  instances 
the  alarming  images  are  the  product  of  fairy-stories, 
or  of  ghost  and  other  alarming  stories  told  by  nurses 
and  others  thoughtlessly.  In  this  way  the  dark  room 
becomes  for  a  timid  child  haunted  by  a  "  bogie "  or 
other  horror.  Alarming  animals,  generally  black,  as 
that  significant  expression  bete  noire  shows,  are  fre- 
quently the  dread  of  these  solitary  hours  in  the  dark 
room.  Lions  and  wolves,  monsters  not  describable 
except  by  saying  that  they  have  claws,  which  they 
can  stretch  out,  these  seem  to  fill  the  blackness  for 
some  children.  The  vague  horrors  of  big  black 
shapeless  things  are  by  no  means  the  lightest  to 
bear. 

In  addition  to  this  overflow  of  the  day's  fears  into 
the  unlit  hours,  sleep  and  the  transitional  states  be- 
tween sleeping  and  waking  also  furnish  much  alarm- 
ing material.  Probably  the  worst  moment  of  this 
trouble  of  the  night  is  when  the  child  wakes  sud- 
denly from  a  sleep  or  half-sleep  with  some  powerful 
dream-image  still  holding  him  in  its  clutches,  and 
when  the  awful  struggle  to  wake  and  to  be  at  home 
with  the  surroundings  issues  in  the  cry,  "  Where  am 
I  ?"  It  is  in  these  moments  of  absolute  hopeless  con- 
fusion that  the  impenetrable  blackness,  refusing  to 
divulge  its  secret,  grows  insufferable.  The  dream- 
images,  but  slightly  slackening  their  hold,  people  the 
blackness  with  nameless  terrors.  The  little  sufferer 
has  to  lie  and   battle   with  these   as   best  he  may, 


The  Battle  with  Fears  :    {a)  The  Onslaught.   103 

perhaps   till  the  slow-moving  day  brings  reassuring 
light  and  the  familiar  look  of  things. 

How  terrible  beyond  all  description,  all  measure- 
ment with  other  things,  these  nightmare  fears  may  be 
in  the  case  of  nervous  children,  the  reminiscences  of 
Charles  Lamb  and  others  have  told  us.  It  is  not  too 
much,  I  think,  to  say  that  to  many  a  child  this  dread 
of  the  black  night  has  been  the  worst  of  his  sufferings. 
At  no  time  is  he  really  so  brave  as  when  he  lies  still 
in  a  cold  damp  terror  and  trusts  to  the  coming  of  the 
morning  light. 

I  do  not  believe  that  fear  of  the  dark  is  universal 
among  young  children.  I  know  a  child  that  did  not 
show  any  trace  of  it  till  some  rather  too  gruesome 
stories  of  Grimm  set  his  brain  horror-spinning  when 
he  ought  to  have  been  going  to  sleep.  A  lady  whom 
I  know  tells  me  that  she  never  had  the  fear  as  a  child 
though  she  acquired  it  later,  towards  the  age  of  thirty. 
How  common  it  is  among  children  under  ten  or  twelve, 
we  have  as  yet  no  means  of  judging.  Some  inquiries 
of  Dr.  Stanley  Hall  show  that  out  of  about  300  young 
people  under  thirty  only  two  appear  to  have  been 
wholly  exempt  from  it,  but  the  ages  at  which  the 
fear  first  appeared  are  not  given. 

Here,  again,  we  have  a  counterbalancing  side.  An 
imaginative  child  can  fill  the  dark  vacancy  of  the 
bedroom  with  bright  pleasing  images.  On  going  to 
bed  and  saying  good-night  to  the  world  of  daylight, 
he  can  see  his  beloved  fairies,  talk  to  them  and  hear 
them  talk.  We  know  how  R.  L.  Stevenson  must, 
when  a  child,  have  gladdened  many  of  his  solitary 
dark  hours  by  bright  fancies.  Even  when  there  is  a 
little  trepidation  a  hardy  child  may  manage  to  play 


I04  Children's  Ways. 

with  his  fears,  and  so  in  a  sense  to  enjoy  his  black 
phantasmagoria,  just  as  grown-ups  may  enjoy  the 
horrors  of  fiction. 

It  will  perhaps  turn  out  that  imaginative  children 
have  both  suffered  and  enjoyed  the  most  in  these 
ways,  the  effect  varying  with  nervous  tone  and  mental 
condition.  Yet  it  seems  probable  that  the  fearful 
suffering  mood  has  here  been  uppermost. 

Why  these  nocturnal  images  tend  to  be  gloomy  and 
alarming  may,  I  think,  be  explained  by  a  number  of 
circumstances.  The  absence  of  light  and  the  on- 
coming of  night  have,  as  we  know,  a  lowering  effect 
on  the  functions  of  the  body ;  and  it  is  not  unlikely 
that  this  might  so  modify  the  action  of  the  brain  as 
to  favour  the  rise  of  gloomy  thoughts.  The  very 
blackness  of  night,  too,  which  we  must  remember  is 
actually  seen  by  the  child,  would  probably  tend  to 
darken  the  young  thoughts.  We  know  how  com- 
monly we  make  black  and  dark  shades  of  colour 
symbols  of  melancholy  and  sorrow.  If  to  this  we 
add  that  in  the  night  a  child  is  apt  to  feel  lost  through 
a  loss  of  all  his  customary  landmarks,  and  that,  worst 
of  all,  he  is,  in  the  midst  of  this  blackness  which  blots 
out  his  daily  home,  left  to  himself,  robbed  of  that 
human  companionship  which  is  his  necessary  stay  and 
comfort,  we  need  not,  I  think,  wonder  at  his  so  often 
encountering  "  the  terror  by  night  ". 

(b)  Damage  of  the  Onslaught, 

1  have  now,  perhaps,  illustrated  sufficiently  some  of 
the  more  common  and  characteristic  fears  of  children. 
The  facts  seem  to  show  that  they  are  exposed  on 


Battle  with  Fears :  (^)  Damage  of  Onslaught.   105 

different  sides  to  the  attacks  of  fear,  and  that  the 
attacking  force  is  large  and  consists  of  a  variety  of 
alarming  shapes. 

If  now  we  glance  back  at  these  several  childish 
fears,  one  feature  in  them  which  at  once  arrests  our 
attention  is  the  small  part  which  remembered  experi- 
ences of  evil  play  in  their  production.  The  child  is 
mexperienced,  and  if  humanely  treated  knows  little  of 
the  acuter  forms  of  human  suffering.  It  would  seem 
at  least  as  if  he  feared  not  so  much  because  his  ex- 
perience had  made  him  aware  of  a  real  danger  in  this 
and  that  direction,  as  because  he  was  constitutionally 
and  instinctively  nervous,  and  possessed  with  a  feeling 
of  insecurity.  More  particularly  children  are  apt  to 
feel  uneasy  when  face  to  face  with  the  new,  the 
strange,  the  unknown,  and  this  uneasiness  grows  into 
a  more  definite  feeling  of  fear  as  soon  as  the  least 
suggestion  of  harmfulness  is  added  ;  as  when  a  child 
recoils  with  dread  from  a  stranger  who  has  a  big 
projecting  eye  that  looks  a  menace,  or  a  squint  which 
suggests  a  sly  way  of  looking  at  you,  or  an  ugly  and 
advancing  tooth  that  threatens  to  bite.  How  much 
the  fear  of  the  dark  is  due  to  inability  to  see  and  so 
to  know  is  shown  by  the  familiar  fact  that  children 
and  adults  who  can  enter  a  strange  gloomy-looking 
room  and  keep  brave  as  long  as  things  are  before 
their  eyes  are  wont  to  feel  a  creepy  sense  of  "  some- 
thing" behind  them  when  they  turn  their  backs  to  re- 
tire and  can  no  longer  see.  It  is  shown  too  in  the 
common  practice  of  children  and  their  elders  to  look 
into  the  cupboard,  under  the  bed,  and  so  forth,  before 
putting  out  the  light ;  for  that  which  has  not  been  in- 
spected retains  dire  possibilities  of  danger. 


io6  Children's  Ways. 

Where  a  child  does  not  know  he  is  apt  to  fancy 
something.  It  is  the  activity  of  children's  imagina- 
tion which  creates  and  sustains  the  larger  number  of 
their  fears.  Do  we  not  indeed  in  saying  that  they 
are  for  the  greater  part  groundless  say  also  that  they 
are  "fanciful "  ? 

Children's  fears  are  often  compared  with  those  of 
animals.  No  doubt  there  are  points  of  contact.  The 
misery  of  a  dog  when  street  music  is  going  on  is  very 
suggestive  of  a  state  of  uneasiness  if  not  of  fully  de- 
veloped fear.  Dogs,  cats,  and  other  animals  will 
"  shy  "  at  the  sight  of  "  uncanny  "  moving  objects,  such 
as  leaves,  feathers,  and  shadows.  Yet  the  great  point 
of  difference  remains  that  animals  not  having  imagina- 
tion are  exempt  from  many  of  the  fearful  foes  which 
menace  childhood,  including  that  arch-foe,  the  black 
night. 

A  much  more  instructive  comparison  of  children's 
fears  may  be  made  with  those  of  savages.  Both  have 
a  like  feeling  of  insecurity  in  presence  of  the  big  un- 
known, especially  the  mysterious  mighty  things,  such 
as  the  storm-wind,  and  the  rare  and  startling  things,  e.g.y 
the  eclipse  and  the  thunder.  The  ignorance  and  sim- 
plicity of  mind,  moreover,  aided  by  a  fertile  fancy, 
which  lead  to  this  and  that  form  of  childish  fear  are  at 
work  also  in  the  case  of  uncivilised  adults.  Hence 
the  familiar  observation  that  children's  superstitious 
fears  often  reflect  those  of  savage  tribes. 

While  children  have  this  organic  predisposition  to 
fear,  the  sufferings  introduced  by  what  we  call  human 
experience  begin  at  an  early  date  to  give  definite 
direction  to  their  fears.  How  much  it  does  this  in 
the  first  months  of  life  it  is  difficult  to  say.     In  the 


Battle  with  Fears :  (/^)  Damage  of  Onslaught.   107 

aversion  of  a  baby  to  its  medicine  glass,  or  its  cold 
bath,  one  sees,  perhaps,  more  of  the  rude  germ  of 
passion  or  anger  than  of  fear.  Some  children,  at 
least,  have  a  surprising  way  of  going  through  a  good 
deal  of  physical  suffering  from  falls,  cuts  and  so  forth, 
without  acquiring  a  genuine  fear  of  what  hurts  them. 
It  is  a  noteworthy  fact  that  a  child  will  be  more 
terrified  during  a  first  experience  of  pain,  especially  if 
there  be  a  visible  hurt  and  bleeding,  than  by  any 
subsequent  prospect  of  a  renewal  of  the  suffering. 

Even  where  fear  can  be  clearly  traced  to  experience 
it  is  doubtful  whether  in  all  cases  it  springs  out  of  a 
definite  expectation  of  some  particular  kind  of  harm. 
When,  for  example,  a  child  who  has  been  frightened 
by  a  dog  betrays  signs  of  fear  at  the  sight  of  a 
kennel,  and  even  of  a  picture  of  a  dog,  may  we  not 
say  that  he  dreads  the  sight  and  the  idea  of  the  dog 
rather  than  any  harmful  act  of  the  animal  ? 

In  these  fears,  then,  we  seem  to  see  much  of  the 
workmanship  of  Nature,  who  has  so  shaped  the 
child's  nervous  system  and  delicately  poised  it  that 
the  trepidation  of  fear  comes  readily.  According  to 
some  she  has  done  more,  burdening  a  child's  spirit 
with  germinal  remains  of  the  fears  of  far-off  savage 
ancestors,  to  whom  darkness  and  the  sounds  of  wild 
beasts  were  fraught  with  danger.  That,  however,  is 
far  from  being  satisfactorily  demonstrated.  We  can 
see  why  in  the  case  of  children,  as  in  that  of  young 
animals.  Nature  tempers  a  bold  curiosity  of  the  new 
by  mingling  with  it  a  certain  amount  of  uneasiness, 
lest  the  ignorant  helpless  things  should  come  to  grief 
by  wandering  from  parental  shelter  and  supplies. 
This,  it  seems  to  me,  is  all  that  Nature  has  done. 


lo8  Children's  Ways. 

And  in  so  doing  has  she  not,  with  excellent  economy, 
done  just  enough  ? 

The  extent  of  suffering  brought  into  child-life  by 
the  assaults  of  fear  is  hard  to  measure.  Even  the 
method  of  questioning  young  people  about  their  fears, 
which  is  now  in  vogue,  is  not  likely  to  bring  us  near 
a  solution  of  this  problem.  And  this  for  the  good 
reason  that  children  are  never  more  reticent  than 
when  talking  of  their  fears,  and  that  by  the  time  the 
fears  are  surmounted  few  can  be  trusted  to  give 
from  memory  an  accurate  report  of  them.  One  thing 
seems  pretty  clear,  and  the  new  questioning  of  chil- 
dren which  is  going  on  apace  in  America  seems  to 
bear  it  out,  viz.,  that,  since  it  is  the  unknown  which  is 
the  primary  occasion  of  these  childish  fears,  and  since 
the  unknown  in  childhood  is  almost  everything,  the 
possibilities  of  suffering  from  this  source  are  great 
enough. 

Alike  the  Good,  the  111  offend  thy  Sight, 
And  rouse  the  stormy  sense  of  shrill  affright. 

{c)  Recovery  from,  the  Onslaught, 

Nevertheless  it  is  quite  possible  here  to  go  from 
one  extreme  of  indifference  to  another  of  sentimental 
exaggeration.  Even  allowing  what  George  Sand 
says,  that  fear  is  "the  greatest  moral  suffering  of 
children,"  the  suffering  may  turn  out  to  be  less  cruelly 
severe  than  it  looks. 

To  begin  with,  then,  if  children  are  sadly  open  to 
the  attacks  of  fear  on  certain  sides  they  are  com- 
pletely defended  on  other  sides  by  their  ignorance. 
This  is  well   illustrated   in    the   pretty  story  of  the 


Battle  with  Fears:  (c)  Recovery  from  Onslaught.  109 

child  Walter  Scott,  who  was  found  out  of  doors  lying 
on  his  back  during  a  thunderstorm,  clapping  his  hands 
and  shouting,  *'  Bonnie  !  bonnie  !  "  at  each  new  flash. 
Again,  if,  as  we  have  supposed,  children's  fears  are 
mostly  due  to  a  feeling  of  insecurity  in  view  of  the 
unknown,  they  may  be  said  to  correct  themselves  to  a 
large  extent  By  getting  used  to  the  disturbing  sound, 
the  ugly  black  doll,  and  so  forth,  a  child,  like  a  dog, 
tends  to  lose  its  first  fear.  One  must  say  "  tends,"  for 
the  well-known  fact  that  many  persons  carry  with 
them  into  later  life  their  early  fear  of  the  dark  shows 
that  when  once  the  habit  of  fearing  has  got  set  no 
amount  of  familiarity  will  suffice  to  dissolve  it. 

Not  only  are  the  points  of  attack  thus  limited  ;  the 
attack  when  it  does  take  place  may  bring  something 
better  than  a  debasing  fear.  A  child  may,  it  is  cer- 
tain, suffer  acutely  when  it  is  frightened.  But  if  only 
there  is  the  magic  circle  of  the  mother's  arms  within 
reach  may  it  not  be  said  that  the  fear  is  more  than 
counterbalanced  by  the  greatest  emotional  luxury  of 
childhood,  the  loving  embrace  ?  It  is  the  shy  fears, 
breeding  the  new  fear  of  exposure  to  unloving  eyes 
and  possibly  to  ridicule,  which  are  the  tragedy  of 
childhood. 

In  addition  to  these  extraneous  aids  children  are 
provided  by  Nature  with  capacities  of  self-defence. 
I  have  pointed  out  that  the  impulses  of  curiosity  and 
fear  lie  close  together  in  a  child's  mind,  so  that  one 
can  hardly  say  beforehand  which  of  the  two  is  going 
to  be  awakened  first  by  the  coming  of  the  new  and 
strange  thing.  The  eager  desire  to  know  about 
things  is  perhaps  the  most  perfect  inward  defence 
against  many  childish  fears.     Even  when  fear  is  half 


no  Children's  Ways. 

awake  the  passionate  longing  to  see  will  force  its 
way.  A  little  girl  that  was  frightened  at  a  Japanese 
doll  just  given  her  and  would  not  approach  it,  in- 
sisted on  seeing  it  at  some  distance  every  day.  The 
same  backing  of  a  timid  child's  spirit  by  hardy 
curiosity  shows  itself  in  his  way  of  peeping  at  a  dog 
which  has  just  terrified  him  and  gradually  approaching 
the  monster. 

Better  still,  in  the  hardier  race  of  children  Nature 
has  planted  an  impulse  which  not  only  disarms  fear 
but  turns  it  into  a  frolicsome  companion.  Many 
children,  I  feel  sure,  maintain  a  double  attitude 
towards  their  terrors,  the  bogies,  the  giants  and  the 
rest.  Moments  of  cruel  suffering  alternate  with 
moments  of  brave  exultation.  Fear  in  children,  even 
more  than  in  adults,  is  an  instinctive  process  into 
which  but  little  thought  enters.  If  the  nerves  are 
slack,  and  if  the  circumstances  are  eerie  and  fear- 
provoking,  the  sudden  strange  sound,  the  appearance 
of  a  black  something,  will  send  the  swift  shudder 
through  the  small  body ;  if,  on  the  other  hand,  the 
child  is  cooler  and  has  the  cheering  daylight  to  back 
him,  he  may  be  bold  enough  to  play  with  his  fears, 
and  to  talk  of  them  to  others  with  the  chuckle  of 
superiority.^  The  more  real  and  oppressive  the  fit  of 
fear  the  more  enjoyable  is  the  subsequent  self-deliver- 
ance by  a  perspicacious  laugh  likely  to  be.  The 
beginnings  of  childish  bravery  often  take  the  form  of 
laughing  away  their  fears.  Even  when  the  ugly 
phantoms  are  not  wholly  driven  back  they  are  half 
seen  through,  and  the  child  who  is  strong  enough  can 

1  Mrs.  Meynell  gives  an  example  of  this  in  her  volume  The 
Children  ("  The  Man  with  Two  Heads  "). 


Battle  with  Fears:  (r)  Recovery  from  Onslaught.  1 1 1 

amuse  himself  with  them,  suffering  the  momentary 
compression  for  the  sake  of  the  joyous  expan- 
sion which  so  swiftly  follows.  A  child  of  two,  the 
same  that  asked  his  mother,  "  Would  you  like  to 
take  hold  of  my  hand  ?  "  was  once  taken  out  by  her 
on  a  little  sledge.  Being  turned  too  suddenly  he  was 
pitched  into  the  snow,  almost  on  his  head ;  but  on 
being  picked  up  by  his  mother  he  remarked  quite 
calmly:  "I  nearly  tumbled  off".  Another  child  of 
six  on  entering  an  empty  room  alone,  stamped  his 
foot  and  shouted  :  "  Go  away  everything  that's  here  ! " 
In  such  ways  do  the  nerves  of  a  strong  child  recover 
themselves  after  shock  and  tremor,  taking  on  some- 
thing of  the  steady  pose  of  human  bravery. 


CHAPTER  IX. 

GOOD  AND  BAD  IN  THE  MAKING. 

Children  have  had  passed  on  their  moral  character- 
istics the  extremes  of  human  judgment.  By  some, 
including  a  number  of  theologians,  they  have  been 
viewed  as  steeped  in  depravity;  by  others,  e.g.,  Rous- 
seau, they  have  been  regarded  as  the  perfection  of 
the  Creator's  workmanship. 

If  we  are  to  throw  any  light  on  the  point  in  dispute 
we  must  avoid  the  unfairness  of  applying  grown-up 
standards  to  childish  actions,  and  must  expect  neither 
the  vices  nor  the  virtues  of  manhood.  We  must 
further  take  some  pains  to  get,  so  far  as  this  is 
possible,  at  children's  natural  inclinations  so  as  to  see 
whether,  and  if  so  how  far,  they  set  in  the  direction  of 
good  or  of  bad. 

Traces  of  the  Brute. 

Even  a  distant  acquaintance  with  the  first  years  of 
human  life  tells  us  that  young  children  have  much  in 
common  with  the  lower  animals.  The  characteristic 
feelings  and  impulses  are  centred  in  self  and  the  satis- 
faction of  its  wants.  What  is  better  marked,  for  ex- 
ample, than  the  boundless  greed  of  the  child,  his  keen 
desire  to  appropriate  and  enjoy  whatever  presents 
itself,  and  to  resent  others'  participation  in  such  enjoy- 
ment? 


Good  and  Bad  in  the  Making.  ii;j 

We  note,  further,  that  when  later  on  he  makes  fuller 
acquaintance  with  his  social  surroundings,  his  first 
attitude  has  in  it  much  of  the  hostih'ty  of  the 
Ishmaelite.  The  removal  of  the  feeding  bottle  before 
full  satisfaction  has  been  attained  is,  as  we  know,  the 
occasion  for  one  of  the  most  impressive  utterances  of 
the  baby's  "  will  to  live,"  and  of  its  resentment  of  all 
human  checks  to  its  native  impulses.  Here  we  have 
the  first  rude  germ  of  that  opposition  of  will  which 
makes  the  Ishmaelite  look  on  others  as  his  foes. 

The  same  attitude  of  isolating  hostility  is  apt  to 
show  itself  towards  other  children.  In  the  matter 
of  toys,  for  example,  the  natural  way  of  a  child  is 
very  frequently  not  only  to  make  free  with  other 
children's  property  when  he  has  the  chance,  but  to 
show  the  strongest  objection  to  any  imitation  of  this 
freedom  by  others,  sometimes  indeed  to  display  a 
dog-in-the-manger  spirit  by  refusing  to  lend  what  he 
himself  does  not  want. 

The  same  vigorous  egoism  inspires  the  whole 
scale  of  childish  envies  and  jealousies,  from  those 
having  to  do  with  things  of  the  appetite  to  those 
which  trouble  themselves  about  the  marks  of  others' 
good-will,  such  as  caresses  and  praises. 

In  this  wide  category  of  childish  egoisms  we 
seem  to  be  near  the  level  of  animal  ways.  Out 
of  all  this  fierce  pushing  of  desire  whereby  the  child 
comes  into  rude  collision  with  others'  wishes,  there 
issue  the  storms  of  young  passion.  The  energy 
of  these  displays  of  wrath  as  the  imperious  little  will 
feels  itself  suddenly  pulled  up  has  in  spite  of  its 
comicality  something  impressive.  We  all  know  the 
shocking  scene  as  the  boy  Ishmaelite  gives  clearest 


114  Children's  Ways. 

and  most  emphatic  utterance  to  his  will  by  hitting 
out  with  his  arms,  stamping  and  kicking,  throwing 
things  down  on  the  floor  and  breaking  them,  and 
accompanying  this  war-dance  with  savage  bowlings 
and  yellings.  The  outburst  tends  to  concentrate  itself 
in  a  real  attack  on  somebody.  Sometimes  this  is  the 
offender,  as  when  Darwin's  boy  at  the  age  of  two 
years  and  three  months  would  throw  books,  sticks, 
etc.,  at  any  one  who  offended  him.  But  almost  any- 
body or  anything  will  do  as  an  object  of  attack.  A 
child  of  four  on  having  his  lordly  purpose  crossed 
would  bang  his  chair,  and  then  proceed  to  vent  his 
displeasure  on  his  unoffending  toy  lion,  banging  him, 
jumping  on  him,  and,  as  anti-climax,  threatening  him 
with  the  loss  of  his  dinner.  Hitting  is  in  many  cases 
improved  upon  by  biting. 

Such  fits  of  temper,  as  we  call  them,  vary  in  their 
manner  from  child  to  child.  Thus,  whereas  one  little 
boy  would  savagely  bite  or  roll  on  the  floor,  his  sister 
was  accustomed  to  dance  about  and  stamp.  They  vary 
greatly  too  in  their  frequency  and  their  force.  Some 
children  show  in  their  anger  little  if  anything  of 
savage  furiousness.  It  is  to  be  added,  that  with  those 
who  do  show  it,  it  is  wont  in  most  cases  to  appear 
only  for  a  limited  period. 

The  resemblance  of  this  fierce  anger  to  the  fury  of  the 
savage  and  of  the  brute  can  hardly  fail  to  be  noticed. 
Here  indeed,  as  is  illustrated  in  the  good  hymn  of  our 
nursery  days,  which  bids  us  leave  biting  to  the  dogs,  we 
see  most  plainly  how  firmly  planted  an  animal  root  lies 
at  the  bottom  of  our  proud  humanity.  Ages  of  civilisa- 
tion have  not  succeeded  in  eradicating  some  of  the  most 
characteristic  and  unpleasant  impulses  of  the  brute. 


Good  and  Bad  in  the  Making.  115 

At  the  same  time  a  child's  passionateness  is  more 
than  a  brute  instinct.  He  suffers  consciously ;  he 
realises  himself  in  lonely  antagonism  to  a  world. 
This  is  seen  in  the  bodily  attitude  of  dejection  which 
often  follows  the  more  vigorous  stage  of  the  fit,  when 
the  little  Ishmaelite,  growing  aware  of  the  impotence  of 
his  anger,  is  wont  to  throw  himself  on  the  floor  and  to 
hide  his  head  in  solitary  wretchedness.  This  conscious- 
ness of  absolute  isolation  and  hostility  reaches  a  higher 
phase  when  the  opposing  force  is  distinctly  appre- 
hended as  human  will.  A  dim  recognition  of  the 
stronger  will  facing  him  brings  the  sense  of  injury, 
of  tyrannous  power. 

Now  this  feeling  of  being  injured  and  oppressed  is 
human,  and  is  fraught  with  moral  possibilities.  It  is 
not  as  yet  morally  good ;  for  the  sense  of  injury  is 
capable  of  developing,  and  may  actually  turn  by-and- 
by  into,  hatred.  Yet,  as  we  shall  see,  it  holds  within 
itself  a  promise  of  something  higher. 

This  predominance  of  self,  this  kinship  with  the 
unsocial  brute,  which  shows  itself  in  these  germinal 
animosities,  seems  to  be  discoverable  also  in  the  un- 
feelingness  of  children.  A  common  charge  against 
them  from  those  who  are  not  on  intimate  terms  with 
them,  and  sometimes,  alas,  from  those  who  are,  is  that 
they  are  heartless  and  cruel. 

That  children  often  appear  to  the  adult  as  un- 
feeling as  a  stone,  is,  I  suppose,  incontestable.  The 
troubles  which  harass  and  oppress  the  mother  may 
leave  her  small  companion  quite  unconcerned.  He 
either  goes  on  playing  with  undisturbed  cheerfulness, 
or  he  betrays  a  momentary  curiosity  about  some  trivial 
circumstance  of  her  affliction  which  is  worse  than  the 


Il6  Children's  Ways. 

absorption  in  play  through  its  tantalising  want  of  any 
genuine  feeh'ng.  If,  for  example,  she  is  ill,  the  event 
is  interesting  to  him  merely  as  supplying  him  with 
new  treats.  A  little  boy  of  four,  after  spending  half 
an  hour  in  his  mother's  sick-room,  coolly  informed  his 
nurse  :  "  I  have  had  a  very  nice  time,  mamma's  ill ! " 
The  order  of  the  two  statements  is  significant  of 
the  common  attitude  of  mind  of  children  towards 
others'  sufferings. 

When  it  comes  to  the  bigger  human  troubles  this 
want  of  fellow-feeling  is  still  more  noticeable.  No- 
thing is  more  shocking  to  the  adult  observer  of  chil- 
dren than  their  coldness  and  stolidity  in  presence  of 
death.  While  a  whole  house  is  stricken  with  grief  at 
the  loss  of  a  beloved  inmate  the  child  is  wont  to 
preserve  his  serenity,  being  often  taken  with  a  shock- 
ing curiosity  to  peep  into  the  dead  room,  and  to  get 
perhaps  the  gruesome  pleasure  of  touching  the  dead 
body  so  as  to  know  what  "  as  cold  as  death "  means, 
and  at  best  showing  only  a  feeling  of  awe  before  a 
great  mystery. 

No  one,  I  think,  will  doubt  that  judged  by  our 
standards  children  are  often  profoundly  and  shock- 
ingly callous.  But  the  question  arises  here,  too, 
whether  we  are  right  in  applying  our  grown-up 
standards.  It  is  one  thing  to  be  indifferent  with  full 
knowledge  of  suffering,  another  to  be  indifferent  in 
the  sense  in  which  a  cat  might  be  said  to  be  so  at  the 
spectacle  of  your  falling  or  burning  your  finger.  We 
are  apt  to  forget  that  a  large  part  of  the  manifestation 
of  human  suffering  is  quite  unintelligible  to  a  little 
child. 

Again,   when   an    appeal    to    serious    attention   is 


Good  and  Bad  in  the  Making.  117 

given,  a  child  is  apt  to  spy  something  besides  the 
sadness.  The  little  girl  who  wanted  to  touch,  and 
to  know  the  meaning  of  "  cold  as  death,"  on  going  to 
see  a  dead  schoolmate  was  not  unnaturally  taken  up 
with  the  beauty  of  the  scene,  with  the  white  hangings 
and  the  white  flowers. 

I  am  far  from  saying  that  the  first  acquaintance 
with  death  commonly  leaves  a  child  indifferent  to  the 
signs  of  woe.  I  believe,  on  the  contrary,  that  chil- 
dren are  frequently  affected  in  a  vague  way  by  the 
surrounding  gloom.  In  some  cases,  too,  as  published 
reminiscences  of  childhood  show,  the  first  acquaint- 
ance with  the  cruel  monarch  has  sometimes  shaken 
a  child's  whole  being  with  an  infinite,  nameless  sense 
of  woe. 

With  this  unfeelingness  children  are  frequently 
charged  with  active  unkindness,  amounting  to  cruelty. 
La  Fontaine  spoke  of  the  age  of  childhood  as  pitiless 
(^ans  pitie) . 

This  appearance  of  cruelty  will  now  and  again  show 
itself  in  dealings  with  other  children.  One  of  the  trying 
situations  of  early  life  is  to  find  oneself  supplanted  by 
the  arrival  of  a  new  baby.  Children,  I  have  reason 
to  think,  are,  in  such  circumstances,  capable  of  coming 
shockingly  near  to  a  feeling  of  hatred.  One  little  girl 
was  taken  with  so  violent  an  antipathy  to  a  baby 
which  she  considered  outrageously  ugly  as  to  make 
a  beginning,  fortunately  only  a  feeble  beginning,  at 
smashing  its  head,  much  as  she  would  no  doubt  have 
tried  to  destroy  an  ugly-looking  doll. 

Such  malicious  treatment  of  smaller  infants  is,  I 
think,  rare.  More  common  is  the  exhibition  of  the 
signs  of  cruelty  in  the  child's  dealings  with  animals. 


Ii8  Children's  Ways. 

It  is  of  this,  indeed,  that  we  mostly  think  when  we 
speak  of  his  cruelty. 

At  first  nothing  seems  clearer  than  the  evidence  of 
malevolent  intention  in  a  child's  treatment  of  animals. 
A  little  girl  when  only  a  year  old  would  lift  two 
kittens  by  the  neck  and  try  to  stamp  on  them.  Older 
children  often  have  a  way  of  treating  even  their  pets 
with  a  similar  roughness. 

Yet  I  think  we  cannot  safely  say  that  such  rough 
usage  is  intended  to  be  painful.  It  seems  rather  to 
be  the  outcome  of  the  mere  energy  of  the  childish 
impulse  to  hold,  possess,  and  completely  dominate 
his  pet. 

The  case  of  destructive  cruelty,  as  when  a  small 
boy  crushes  a  fly,  is  somewhat  different.  Let  me 
give  a  well-observed  instance.  A  little  boy  of  two 
years  and  two  months,  "  after  nearly  killing  a  fly  on 
the  window-pane,  seemed  surprised  and  disturbed, 
looking  round  for  an  explanation,  then  gave  it  him- 
self: '  Mr.  Fly  dom  (gone)  to  by-by '.  But  he  would 
not  touch  it  or  another  fly  again— a  doubt  evidently 
remained,  and  he  continued  uneasy  about  it."  Here 
the  arrest  of  life  clearly  brought  a  kind  of  shock,  and 
we  may  safely  say  was  not  thought  out  beforehand. 
Children  may  pounce  upon  and  maul  small  moving 
things  for  a  number  of  reasons.  The  wish  to  gratify 
their  sense  of  power — which  is  probably  keener  in 
children  who  so  rarely  gratify  it  than  in  grown-ups — 
will  often  explain  these  actions.  To  stop  all  that 
commotion,  all  that  buzzing  on  the  window-pane,  by 
a  single  tap  of  the  finger,  that  may  bring  a  delicious 
thrill  of  power  to  a  child.  Curiosity,  too,  is  a  power- 
ful incentive  to  this  kind  of  maltreatment  of  animals. 


Good  and  Bad  in  the  Making.  119 

Children  have  something  of  the  anatomist's  impulse 
to  take  living  things  apart,  to  see  where  the  blood  is, 
as  one  child  put  it,  and  so  forth. 

I  think,  then,  that  we  may  give  the  small  offenders 
the  benefit  of  the  doubt,  and  not  attribute  their  rough 
handling  of  animals  to  a  wish  to  inflict  pain,  or  even 
to  an  indifference  to  pain  of  which  they  are  clearly 
aware.  Wanton  activity,  the  curiosity  of  the  experi- 
menter, and  delight  in  showing  one's  power  and  pro- 
ducing an  effect,  seem  sufficient  to  explain  a  large 
part  of  the  unlearned  brutality  of  the  first  years. 

We  have  now  looked  at  one  of  the  darkest  sides  of 
the  child  and  have  found  that  though  it  is  decidedly 
unpleasant  it  is  not  quite  so  ugly  as  it  has  been  painted. 
Children  are  no  doubt  apt  to  be  greedy,  and  other- 
wise unsociable,  to  be  ferocious  in  their  anger,  and  to 
be  sadly  wanting  in  consideration  for  others  ;  yet  it  is 
some  consolation  to  reflect  that  their  savageness  is  not 
quite  that  of  brutes,  and  that  their  selfishness  and 
cruelty  are  a  long  way  removed  from  a  deliberate  and 
calculating  egoism. 

The  Promise  of  Hujnanity. 

Pure  Ishmaelite  as  he  seems,  however,  a  child  has 
what  we  call  the  social  instincts,  and  inconsistently 
enough  no  doubt  he  shows  at  times  that  after  all  he 
wants  to  join  himself  to  those  whom  at  other  times  he 
treats  as  foes.  If  he  has  his  outbursts  of  temper  he 
has  also  his  fits  of  tenderness.  If  he  is  now  dead  to 
others'  sufferings  he  is  at  another  time  taken  with  a 
most  amiable  childish  concern  for  their  happiness. 

The  germ  of  this  instinct  of  attachment  to  society 


I20  Children's  Ways. 

may  be  said  to  disclose  itself  in  a  rude  form  in  the 
iirst  weeks  of  life,  when  he  begins  to  get  used  to  and 
to  depend  on  the  human  presence,  and  is  miserable 
when  this  is  taken  from  him. 

In  this  instinct  of  companionship  there  is  involved 
a  vague  inarticulate  kind  of  sympathy.  Just  as  the 
attached  dog  may  be  said  to  have  in  a  dim  fashion  a 
feeling  of  oneness  with  its  master,  so  the  child.  The 
intenser  realisation  of  this  oneness  comes  after  separa- 
tion. A  girl  of  thirteen  months  was  separated  from  her 
mother  during  six  weeks.  On  the  return  of  the  latter 
she  was  speechless,  and  for  some  time  could  not  bear 
to  leave  her  restored  companion  for  a  minute,  A  like 
outbreak  of  tender  sympathy  is  apt  to  follow  a  fit  of 
naughtiness  when  a  child  feels  itself  taken  back  to  the 
mother's  heart. 

Sympathy,  it  is  commonly  said,  is  a  kind  of  imita- 
tion, and  this  is  strikingly  illustrated  in  its  early 
forms.  A  child  has  been  observed  under  the  age  of 
seven  months  to  look  unhappy,  drawing  down  well 
the  corners  of  the  mouth  in  the  characteristic  baby- 
fashion  when  his  nurse  pretended  to  cry. 

This  imitative  sympathy  deepens  with  attachment. 
We  see  something  of  it  in  the  child's  make-believe. 
When,  for  example,  a  little  girl  on  finding  that  her 
mother's  head  ached  pretended  to  have  a  bad  head, 
we  appear  to  see  the  working  of  an  impulse  to  get 
near  and  share  in  others'  experiences.  The  same 
feeling  shows  itself  in  play,  especially  in  the  treat- 
ment of  the  doll,  which  has  to  go  through  all  that 
the  child  goes  through,  to  be  bathed,  scolded,  nursed 
when  poorly,  and  so  forth. 

From  this  imitative  acting  of  another's  trouble,  so 


Good  and  Bad  in  the  Making.  121 

as  to  share  in  it,  there  is  but  a  step  to  that  more 
direct  apprehension  of  it  which  we  call  sympathy. 
Children  sometimes  begin  to  display  such  under- 
standing of  others'  trouble  early  in  the  second  year. 
One  mite  of  fourteen  months  was  quite  concerned  at 
the  misery  of  an  elder  sister,  crawling  towards  her  and 
making  comical  endeavours  by  grunts  and  imitative 
movements  of  the  fingers  to  allay  her  crying.  I  have  a 
number  of  stories  showing  that  for  a  period  beginning 
early  in  the  second  year  it  is  not  uncommon  for  chil- 
dren to  betray  an  exuberance  of  pity,  being  moved 
almost  to  tears,  for  example,  when  the  mother  says, 
"  Poor  uncle ! "  or  when  contemplating  in  a  picture 
the  tragic  fate  of  Humpty  Dumpty. 

Very  sweet  and  sacred  to  a  mother  are  the  first 
manifestations  of  tenderness  towards  herself.  A  child 
about  the  age  of  two  has  a  way  of  looking  at  and 
touching  its  mother's  face  with  something  of  the 
rapturous  expression  of  a  lover.  Still  sweeter,  per- 
haps, are  the  first  clear  indications  of  loving  concern. 
The  temporary  loss  of  her  presence,  due  to  illness  or 
other  cause,  is  often  the  occasion  for  the  appearance 
of  a  deeper  tenderness.  A  little  boy  of  three  spon- 
taneously brought  his  story-book  to  his  mother  when 
she  lay  in  bed  ill ;  and  the  same  child  used  to  follow 
her  about  after  her  recovery  with  all  the  devotion  of 
a  little  knight.  At  other  times  it  is  the  suspicion  of  an 
injury  to  his  beloved  one,  as  when  one  little  fellow 
seeing  the  strange  doctor  lay  hold  of  his  mother's 
wrist  stood  up  like  an  outraged  turkey-cock,  backing 
into  his  mother's  skirts,  ready  to  charge  the  assaulter. 

A  deeper  and  thoughtful  kind  of  sympathy  often 
comes  with  the  advent  of  the  more  reflective  years. 


122  Children's  Ways. 

Thought  about  the  overhanging  terror,  death,  is  some- 
times its  awakener.  "Are  you  old,  mother?"  asked 
a  boy  of  five.  "  Why  ?  "  she  answered.  "  Because,"  he 
continued,  "  the  older  you  are  the  nearer  you  are  to 
dying."  There  was  no  doubt  thought  of  his  own  loss 
in  this  question  :  yet  there  was,  one  may  hope,  a  germ 
of  solicitude  for  the  mother  too. 

This  first  thought  for  others  frequently  takes  the 
practical  form  of  helpfulness.  A  child  loves  nothing 
better  than  to  assist  in  little  household  occupations. 
A  boy  of  two  years  and  one  month  happened  to 
overhear  his  nurse  say  to  herself:  "  I  wish  that  Anne 
would  remember  to  fill  the  nursery  boiler ".  "  He 
listened,  and  presently  trotted  off;  found  the  said 
Anne  doing  a  distant  grate,  pulled  her  by  the  apron, 
saying  :  '  Nanna,  Nanna  I '  (come  to  nurse).  She 
followed,  surprised  and  puzzled,  the  child  pulling  all 
the  way,  till,  having  got  her  into  the  nursery,  he 
pointed  to  the  boiler,  and  added  :  '  Go  dare,  go  dare,' 
so  that  the  girl  comprehended  and  did  as  he  bade 
her." 

With  this  practical  form  of  sympathy  there  goes  a 
quite  charming  disposition  to  give  pleasure  in  other 
ways.  A  little  girl  when  just  a  year  old  was  given  to 
offering  her  toys,  flowers,  and  other  pretty  things  to 
everybody.  Generosity  is  as  truly  an  impulse  of 
childhood  as  greediness,  and  it  is  odd  to  observe  their 
alternate  play.  Early  in  the  second  year,  too,  children 
are  wont  to  show  themselves  kindly  by  giving  kisses 
and  other  pretty  courtesies.  In  truth  from  about  this 
date  they  are  often  quite  charming  in  their  ex- 
pressions of  good  will,  so  that  the  good  Bishop  Earle 
hardly  exaggerates  when  he  writes  of  the  child  :  "  He 


Good  and  Bad  in  the  Making.  123 

kisses  and  loves  all,  and  when  the  smart  of  the  rod  is 
past,  smiles  on  his  beater".  Later  on  a  like  amiable 
disposition  will  show  itself  in  graceful  turns  of  speech, 
as  when  a  little  girl,  aged  three  and  a  quarter,  peti- 
tioned her  mother  this  wise:  "Please,  mamma,  will 
you  pin  this  with  the  greatest  pleasure?  " 

Just  as  there  are  these  beginnings  of  affectionate 
concern  for  the  mother  and  other  people,  so  there  is 
ample  evidence  of  kindness  to  animals.  The  charge 
of  cruelty  in  the  case  of  little  children  is,  indeed,  seen 
to  be  a  gross  libel  as  soon  as  we  consider  their  whole 
behaviour  towards  the  animal  world. 

When  once  the  first  fear  of  the  strangeness  is 
mastered  a  child  will  generally  take  kindly  to  an 
animal.  A  little  boy  of  fifteen  months  quickly  over- 
came his  fright  at  the  barking  of  his  grandfather's 
dog,  and  began  to  share  his  biscuits  with  him,  to  give 
him  flowers  to  smell,  and  to  throw  stones  for  his 
amusement. 

At  a  quite  early  age,  too,  children  will  show  the 
germ  of  a  truly  humane  feeling  towards  animals. 
The  same  little  boy  that  bravely  got  over  his  fear  of 
the  dog's  barking  would,  when  nineteen  months  old, 
begin  to  cry  on  seeing  a  horse  fall  in  the  street. 
Stronger  manifestations  of  pity  are  seen  at  a  later 
age.  A  little  boy  of  four  was  moved  to  passionate 
grief  at  the  sight  of  a  dead  dog  taken  from  a  pond. 

The  indignation  of  children  at  the  doings  of  the 
butcher,  the  hunter  and  others,  shows  how  deeply 
pitiful  consideration  for  animals  is  rooted  in  their 
hearts.  This  is  one  of  the  most  striking  manifesta- 
tions of  the  better  side  of  child-nature  and  deserves  a 
chapter  to  itself. 


124  Children's  Ways. 

The  close  absorbing  sympathy  which  we  often 
observe  between  a  child  and  animals  seems  to  come 
from  a  sense  of  common  weaknesses  and  needs.  Per- 
haps there  is  in  it  something  of  that  instinctive 
impulse  of  helpless  things  to  band  together  which  we 
see  in  sheep  and  other  gregarious  animals.  A  mother 
once  remarked  to  her  boy,  between  five  and  six  years 
old :  "  Why,  R.,  I  believe  you  are  kinder  to  the 
animals  than  to  me".  "Perhaps  I  am,"  he  replied, 
"you  see  they  are  not  so  well  off  as  you  are." 

The  same  outpourings  of  affection  are  seen  in 
the  dealings  of  children  with  their  toy  babies  and 
animals.  Allowing  for  occasional  outbreaks  of  tem- 
per and  acts  of  violence,  a  child's  intercourse  with  his 
doll  or  his  toy  "  gee  gee "  is  a  wonderful  display  of 
loving  solicitude  ;  a  solicitude  which  has  something 
of  the  endurance  of  a  maternal  instinct. 

Here,  too,  as  we  know,  children  vary  greatly ;  there 
are  the  loving  and  the  unloving  moods,  and  there  are 
the  loving  and  the  unloving  children.  Yet  allowing 
for  these  facts,  I  think  it  may  be  said  that  in  these 
first  fresh  outgoings  of  human  tenderness  we  have  a 
comforting  set  off  to  the  unamiable  manifestations 
described  above. 

The  Lapse  into  Lying. 
The  other  main  charge  against  children  is  that  they 
tell  lies.  According  to  many,  children  are  in  general 
accomplished  little  liars,  to  the  manner  born,  and 
equally  adept  with  the  mendacious  savage.  Even 
writers  on  childhood  who  are  by  no  means  prejudiced 
against  it  lean  to  the  view  that  lying  is  instinctive 
and  universal  among  children. 


Good  and  Bad  in  the  Making.  125 

Now  it  is  surely  permissible  to  doubt  whether  little 
children  have  so  clear  an  apprehension  of  what  we 
understand  by  truth  and  falsity  as  to  be  liars  in  this 
full  sense.  Much  of  what  seems  shocking  to  the 
adult  unable  to  place  himself  at  the  level  of  childish 
intelligence  and  feeling  will  probably  prove  to  be 
something  far  less  serious. 

To  begin  with  those  little  ruses  and  dissimulations 
which  are  said  to  appear  almost  from  the  cradle  in 
the  case  of  certain  children,  it  is  plainly  difficult  to 
bring  them  into  the  category  of  full-fledged  lies. 
When,  for  example,  a  child  wishing  to  keep  a  thing 
hides  it,  and  on  your  asking  for  it  holds  out  empty 
hands,  it  would  be  hard  to  name  this  action  a  lie, 
even  though  there  may  be  in  it  a  germ  of  deception. 
These  little  ruses  or  "acted  lies"  seem  at  the  worst 
to  be  attempts  to  put  you  off  the  scent  in  what  is 
regarded  as  a  private  matter,  and  to  have  the  mini- 
mum of  intentional  deception.  This  childish  passion 
for  guarding  secrets  may  account  for  later  and  more 
serious-looking  falsehoods. 

There  is  a  more  alarming  appearance  of  mendacity 
when  the  child  comes  to  the  use  of  language  and 
proffers  statements  which,  if  he  reflected,  he  might 
know  to  be  false.  Even  here,  however,  we  may  easily 
apply  grown-up  standards  unfairly.  Anybody  who 
has  observed  children's  play  and  knows  how  real  to 
them  their  fancies  become  for  the  moment  will  be 
chary  of  applying  to  their  sayings  the  word  "  lie ". 
There  may  be  solemn  sticklers  for  truth  who  would 
be  shocked  to  hear  the  child  when  at  play  saying, 
"  I  am  a  coachman,"  "  Dolly  is  crying,"  and  so  forth. 
But  the  discerning  see  nothing  to  be  alarmed  at  here. 


126  Children's  Ways. 

On  the  same  level  of  moral  obliquity  I  should  be 
disposed  to  place  those  cases  where  a  child  will  con- 
tradictingly  say  the  opposite  of  what  he  is  told.  A 
little  French  boy  was  overheard  saying  to  himself: 
"  Papa  parle  mal,  il  a  dit  sevette,  h6h€  parle  bien,  il  dit 
serviette  ".  Such  reversals  may  be  a  kind  of  play  too  : 
the  child  not  unnaturally  gets  tired  now  and  then  of 
being  told  that  he  is  wrong,  and  for  the  moment 
imagines  himself  right  and  his  elders  wrong,  im- 
mensely enjoying  the  idea. 

The  case  looks  graver  when  an  "  untruth "  is 
uttered  in  answer  to  a  question.  A  little  boy  on 
being  asked  by  his  mother  who  told  him  something, 
answered,  "Dolly".  "False,  and  knowingly  false," 
somebody  will  say,  especially  when  he  learns  that 
the  depraved  youngster  instantly  proceeded  to  laugh. 
But  is  not  this  laugh  just  the  saving  clause  of  the 
story,  suggesting  that  it  was  play  and  the  spirit  of 
mischief  at  bottom  ? 

In  this  case,  I  suspect,  there  was  co-operant  a 
strongly  marked  childish  characteristic,  the  love  of 
producing  an  effect.  A  child  has  a  large  measure  of 
that  feeling  which  R.  L.  Stevenson  attributes  to  the 
light-hearted  Innes  in  Weir  of  Hermiston,  "  the  mere 
pleasure  of  beholding  interested  faces".  The  well- 
known  "cock  and  bull"  stories  of  small  children  are 
inspired  by  this  love  of  strong  effect.  It  is  the 
dramatic  impulse  of  childhood  endeavouring  to  bring 
life  into  the  dulness  of  the  serious  hours.  Childish 
vanity  often  assists,  as  where  a  little  girl  of  five  would 
go  about  scattering  the  most  alarming  kind  of  false 
news,  as,  for  example,  that  baby  was  dead,  simply  to 
court  attention  and  make  herself  of  some  importance; 


Good  and  Bad  in  the  Making.  127 

A  quick  vivid  fancy,  a  childish  passion  for  acting 
a  part,  these,  backed  by  a  strong  impulse  to  astonish, 
and  a  pla>ful  turn  for  contradiction  and  paradox, 
seem  to  me  to  account  for  most  of  this  early  fibbing 
and  other  similar  varieties  of  early  misstatement 
Naughty  it  is,  no  doubt,  in  a  measure  ;  but  is  it  quite 
fairly  branded  as  lying,  that  is,  as  a  serious  attempt 
to  deceive? 

In  some  cases,  I  think,  the  vivid  play  of  imagina- 
tion which  prompts  the  untrue  assertion  may  lead  to  a 
measure  of  self-deception.  When,  for  example,  an 
Italian  child,  of  whom  Signorina  Lombroso  tells  us, 
who  is  out  for  a  walk,  and  wanting  to  be  carried 
says,  "  My  leg  hurts  me  and  my  foot  too  just  here, 
I  can't  walk,  I  can't,  I  can't,"  it  is  possible  at  least 
that  the  vivid  imagination  of  the  South  produces 
at  the  moment  an  illusory  sense  of  fatigue.  And 
if  so  we  must  hesitate  to  call  the  statement  wholly 
a  falsehood. 

A  fertile  source  of  childish  "  untruth,"  which  may 
be  more  true  than  untrue  in  the  sense  of  express- 
ing the  conviction  of  the  moment,  is  the  wish  to 
please.  An  emotional  child  who  in  a  sudden  fit  of 
tenderness  for  his  mother  gushes  out,  "  You're  the 
best  mother  in  the  whole  world  I "  may  be  hardly 
conscious  of  any  exaggeration.  There  is  more  of 
artfulness  in  the  flatteries  which  appear  to  involve  a 
calculating  intention  to  say  the  nice  agreeable  thing. 
Some  children,  especially  little  girls,  are,  I  believe, 
adepts  at  these  amenities.  Those  in  whom  the 
impulse  is  strong  and  dominant  are  perhaps  those 
who  in  later  years  make  the  good  society  actors. 
Yet  if  there  is  a  measure  of  untruth  in  such  pretty 


128  Children's  Ways. 

flatteries,  one  needs  to  be  superhuman  in  order  to 
condemn  them  harshly. 

The  other  side  of  this  wish  to  please  is  the  fear  to 
give  offence,  and  this,  I  suspect,  may  point  to  a  more 
intentional  and  conscious  kind  of  untruth.  If,  for 
example,  a  child  is  asked  whether  he  does  not  like  or 
admire  something,  his  feeling  that  the  questioner 
expects  him  to  say  "  Yes  "  makes  it  very  hard  to  say 
"  No  ".  Mrs.  Burnett  gives  us  a  reminiscence  of  this 
early  experience.  When  she  was  less  than  three,  she 
writes,  a  lady  visitor,  a  friend  of  her  mother,  having 
found  out  that  the  baby  newly  added  to  the  family 
was  called  Edith,  remarked  to  her :  "  That's  a  pretty 
name.  My  baby  is  Eleanor.  Isn't  that  a  pretty 
name  ? "  On  being  thus  questioned  she  felt  in  a 
dreadful  difificulty,  for  she  did  not  like  the  sound  of 
"  Eleanor,"  and  yet  feared  to  be  rude  and  say  so. 
She  got  out  of  it  by  saying  she  did  not  like  the  name 
as  well  as  "  Edith  ". 

In  such  cases  as  this  the  fear  to  give  offence  may 
be  reinforced  by  the  mastering  force  of  "suggestion". 
Just  as  the  hypnotiser  "  suggests  "  to  his  subject  the 
idea  that  he  is  ill,  that  the  dirty  water  in  this  glass  is 
wine,  and  so  forth,  compelling  him  to  accept  and  act 
out  the  idea,  so  we  all  exercise  a  kind  of  suggestive 
sway  over  children's  minds.  Our  leading  questions, 
as  when  we  say,  "  Isn't  this  pretty  ? "  may  for  a 
moment  set  up  a  half  belief  that  the  thing  must 
be  so.  Thus  in  a  double  fashion  do  our  words 
control  children's  thoughts,  driving  them  now  into 
contradiction,  drawing  them  at  other  times  and  in 
other  moods  into  submissive  assent.  Wordsworth 
has    illustrated    how    an    unwise    and    importunate 


Good  and  Bad  in  the  Making.  129 

demand  for  a  reason  from  a  child  may  drive  him 
into  invention.^ 

I  do  not  say  that  these  are  the  only  impulses  which 
prompt  to  this  early  fibbing.  From  some  records  of  the 
first  years  I  learn  that  a  child  may  drift  into  something 
like  a  lie  under  the  pressure  of  fear,  more  especially 
fear  of  being  scolded.  One  little  fellow,  more  than 
once  instanced  in  this  work,  a  single  child  brought  up 
wholly  by  his  mother,  perpetrated  his  first  fib  when 
he  was  about  twenty-two  months  old.  He  went,  it 
seems,  and  threw  his  doll  down  stairs  in  one  of  those 
capricious  outbursts  towards  favourites  which  children 
share  with  certain  sovereigns,  then  went  to  his  mother 
and  making  great  pretence  of  grief  said,  "  Poor  dolly 
tumbled  ".  If  this  had  stood  alone  I  should  have 
been  ready  to  look  on  it  as  a  little  childish  comedy  ; 
but  the  same  child  a  month  or  two  afterwards  would 
invent  a  fib  when  he  wanted  his  mother  to  do  some- 
thing. For  example,  he  was  one  morning  lying  in  bed 
with  his  mother  and  wanted  much  to  get  up.  His 
mother  told  him  to  look  for  the  watch  and  see  what 
time  it  was.  He  felt  under  the  pillow  pretending  to 
find  and  consult  the  time-teller,  saying :  "  Time  to 
get  up  ".  Here  it  was  clearly  the  force  of  the  young 
will  resisting  an  unpleasant  check  which  excited  the 
sober  faculties  to  something  like  deception. 

To  say  that  our  moral  discipline  with  its  injunc- 
tions, its  corrections,  is  a  great  promoter  of  childish 
untruth  may  sound  shocking,  but  it  is  I  think  an  in- 
disputable truth.  We  can  see  how  this  begins  to 
work  in  the  first  years.     For  example,  a  mite  of  three 

^  See  his  poem,  Anecdote  for  Fathers,  showing  how  the  practice  of 
lying  may  be  taught.  ("  Poems  referring  to  the  period  of  childhood.") 


130  Children's  Ways. 

having  in  a  moment  of  temper  called  her  mother 
"  monkey,"  and  being  questioned  as  to  what  she  had 
said,  replied :  "  I  said  /  was  a  monkey  ".  A  child  is 
often  driven  into  such  ruses  by  the  instinct  of  self- 
protection. 

Our  system  of  discipline  may  develop  untruth  in 
other  ways  too.  When,  for  example,  punishment  has 
been  inflicted  and  its  inflicter,  relenting,  asks :  "  Are 
you  sorry?"  or  "Aren't  you  sorry?"  the  answer  is 
exceedingly  likely  to  be  "  No,"  even  though  this  may 
at  the  moment  be  half  felt  to  be  untrue.  From  such 
partial  untruths  the  way  is  easy  to  complete  ones,  as 
when  a  naughty  little  boy  who  is  shut  up  in  his  room 
and  kept  without  food,  is  asked  :  "  Are  you  hungry  ?  " 
and  with  the  hardihood  of  a  confirmed  sinner  answers 
"No,"  even  though  the  low  and  dismal  tone  of  the 
word  shows  how  much  the  untruth  goes  against  the 
grain. 

I  think  there  is  no  doubt,  then,  that  at  a  certain 
age  children  may,  more  especially  under  a  severe 
home  authority,  develop,  apart  from  contagion,  a 
tendency  to  falsehood.  Some  may  see  in  this,  as  in 
childish  fears  and  cruelties,  rudiments  of  character- 
istics which  belonged  to  remote  uncivilised  ancestors. 
However  this  be,  it  is  hard  to  say  that  these  fibs 
have  that  clear  intention  to  deceive  which  constitutes 
a  complete  lie. 

There  are  curious  points  in  the  manner  of  childish 
fibbing,  A  good  many  children  seem  to  be  like 
savages  in  distinguishing  those  to  whom  one  is 
bound  to  speak  the  truth.  The  "bad  form"  of  tell- 
ing a  lie  to  the  head-master  is  a  later  illustration  of 
the  same  thing-.     On  the  other  hand  it  seems  to  be 


Good  and  Bad  in  the  Making.  131 

thought  that  there  are  people  who  are  specially  fitted 
to  be  the  victims  of  untruth.  Even  young  children 
soon  find  out  who  it  is  among  the  servants  that 
being  credulous  supplies  the  best  listener  to  their 
amazing  inventions. 

Another  interesting  point  is  the  way  in  which  the 
perfectly  baseless  fictions  of  children  are  apt  to  grow 
into  permanent  "stories".  In  the  nursery  and  in  the 
playground  there  are  wont  to  be  developed  myths 
and  legends  which  are  solemnly  believed  by  the 
simple-minded,  and  may  be  handed  down  to  suc- 
cessors. In  all  such  cases  of  propagated  untruths  the 
impulse  of  imitation  and  the  tendency  of  the  child's 
mind  to  accept  statements  uncritically  are  of  course 
at  work.  The  "lie"  propagated  by  this  influence  of 
contagion  very  soon  ceases  to  be  a  lie. 

Fealty  to  Truth, 

In  order  to  understand  what  childish  untruth  really 
amounts  to  we  must  carefully  note  its  after-effects  on 
the  perpetrator.  It  seems  certain  that  many  children 
experience  a  qualm  of  conscience  when  uttering  that, 
of  the  falsity  of  which  they  are  more  or  less  aware. 
This  is  evidenced  in  the  well-known  devices  by  which 
the  young  casuist  thinks  to  mitigate  the  lie ;  as 
when  on  saying  what  he  knows  to  be  false  he  adds 
mentally,  "I  do  not  mean  it,"  "in  my  mind,"  or 
some  similar  palliative.  Such  subterfuges  show  a 
measure  of  sensibility,  for  a  hardened  liar  would 
despise  the  shifts,  and  are  curious  as  illustrations  of 
the  childish  conscience  and  its  unlearnt  casuistry. 

The  remorse  that  sometimes  follows  lying,  especially 


132  Children's  Ways. 

the  first  He,  which  catches  the  conscience  at  its  ten- 
derest,  is  much  more  than  this  passing  qualm,  and  has 
been  remembered  by  many  in  later  life.  Here  is  a 
case.  A  young  lady  whom  I  know  remembers  that 
when  a  child  of  four  she  had  to  wear  a  shade  over  her 
eyes.  One  day  on  walking  out  with  her  mother  she 
was  looking,  child-wise,  sidewards  instead  of  in  front, 
and  nearly  struck  a  lamp-post.  Her  mother  then 
scolded  her,  but  presently  remembering  the  eyes, 
said  :  "  Poor  child,  you  could  not  see  well  ".  She 
knew  that  this  was  not  the  reason,  but  she  accepted 
it,  and  for  long  afterwards  was  tormented  with  a  sense 
of  having  told  a  lie. 

Such  remorse,  in  certain  cases  prolonged  beyond  the 
first  lie,  comes  to  the  little  offender  as  he  or  she  lies  in 
bed  and  recalls  the  untruths  of  the  day.  Some  children 
suffer  greatly  from  this  periodic  reflection  on  their  lies. 

Some  of  the  more  poignant  of  the  sufferings  which 
come  to  the  sensitive  child  from  saying  what  is  false 
are  those  of  fear,  fear  of  those  terrific  penalties  which 
religious  teaching  attaches  to  the  lying  tongue.  It 
seems  likely  that  childish  devices  for  allaying  their 
qualms  when  saying  what  is  untrue  are  intended 
somehow  to  make  things  right  with  God,  and  so 
to  avoid  the  dreaded  chastisement.  I  am  sure,  too, 
that  the  subsequent  remorse,  especially  at  night,  is 
very  largely  a  dread  of  some  awful  manifestation  of 
God's  wrath. 

While  I  should  set  down  much  of  this  horror  of 
children  at  discovering  themselves  liars  to  a  dread  of 
supernatural  penalties,  I  should  not  set  down  the 
whole.  I  am  disposed  to  think  that  there  is  another 
force  at  work  in  the  little  people's  consciousness. 


Good  and  Bad  in  the  Making.  133 

In  order  to  explain  what  I  mean,  I  must  begin  by 
saying  that  a  tendency  towards  conscious  falsehood, 
though  common,  does  not  seem  to  be  universal  among 
children.  Several  mothers  assure  me  that  their  chil- 
dren have  never  seriously  put  forth  an  untruth.  I 
can  say  the  same  about  two  children  who  have  been 
especially  observed  for  the  purpose. 

I  am  ready  to  go  further  and  to  suggest  that  where 
a  child  is  brought  up  normally,  that  is,  in  a  habitually 
truth-speaking  community,  he  tends,  quite  apart  from 
moral  instruction,  to  acquire  a  respect  for  truth.  One 
may  easily  see  that  children  accustomed  to  truth- 
speaking  show  all  the  signs  of  a  moral  shock  when 
they  are  confronted  with  a  false  statement.  I  re- 
member after  more  than  twelve  years  one  little  boy's 
outbreaks  of  righteous  indignation  at  meeting  with 
untrue  statements  about  his  beloved  horses  and  other 
things  in  one  of  his  books,  for  which  he  had  all  a 
child's  reverence.  The  idea  of  knowingly  perpetrat- 
ing an  untruth,  so  far  as  I  can  judge,  is  simply  awful 
to  a  child  who  has  been  thoroughly  habituated  to  the 
practice  of  truthful  statement.  May  it,  then,  not  well 
be  that  when  a  preternatural  pressure  of  circumstances 
pushes  the  child  over  the  boundary  line  of  truth,  he 
feels  a  shock,  a  horror,  a  giddy  and  aching  sense  of 
having  violated  law — law  not  wholly  imposed  by  the 
mother's  command,  but  rooted  in  the  very  habits  of 
social  life? 

Our  inquiry  has  led  us  to  recognise,  in  the  case  of 
cruelty  and  of  lying  alike,  that  children  are  by  no 
means  morally  perfect,  but  have  tendencies  which,  if 
not  counteracted  or  held  in  check  by  others,  will  de- 
velop into  the  vices  of  cruelty  and    lying.     On  the 


134  Children's  Ways. 

other  hand  it  has  shown  us  that  there  are  other  and 
counteracting  impulses,  germs  of  human  sympathy  and 
of  respect  for  the  binding  custom  of  truthfulness.  So 
far  from  saying  that  child-nature  is  utterly  bad  or 
beautifully  perfect,  we  should  say  that  it  is  a  dis- 
orderly jumble  of  impulses,  each  pushing  itself  upwards 
in  lively  contest  with  the  others,  some  towards  what 
is  bad,  others  towards  what  is  good.  It  is  on  this 
motley  group  of  tendencies  that  the  hand  of  the  moral 
cultivator  has  to  work,  selecting,  arranging,  organising 
into  a  beautiful  whole; 


CHAPTER  X. 

REBEL  AND  SUBJECT. 

Children  are  early  confronted  with  our  laws,  and  it 
is  worth  while  asking  how  they  behave  in  relation  to 
these.  Many  persons  seem  to  think  that  children 
generally  are  disobedient,  lawless  creatures  ;  others, 
that  some  are  obedient,  others  disobedient  Perhaps 
neither  of  these  views  is  quite  exact  enough. 

(a)  The  Struggle  with  Law :  First  Tussle  with 
Authority. 

Let  us  begin  our  study  by  looking  a  little  more 
closely  at  what  we  call  the  disobedient  attitude  of 
children.  That  it  exists  nobody,  surely,  can  well 
doubt.  The  very  liveliness  of  young  limbs  and  young 
wits  brings  their  possessors  into  conflict  with  our 
sedate  customs.  The  person  who  tries  to  wield 
authority  over  these  small  people  is  constantly  intro- 
ducing unpleasant  checkings  of  vigorous  impulse.  A 
child  has  large  requirements  in  the  matter  of  move- 
ments and  experiments  with  things,  which  are  apt  to 
clash  with  what  the  mother  considers  orderliness  ; 
when  he  is  out  of  doors  he  exhibits  a  duck-like  fond- 
ness for  dirty  water,  whereas  civilisation,  represented 
by  his  tidy  nurse,  wills  it  that  man  should,  at  least  when 
not  in  the  arctic  regions,  be  clean  ;  he  shows  a  perverse 


136  Children's  Ways. 

passion  for  fun  and  tricks  when  the  mother  thinks  it 
the  right  time  for  serious  talk,  and  so  forth.  In  these 
ways  there  comes  the  tussle  with  human  law. 

Yet  surely,  if  we  consider  the  matter  impartially, 
we  shall  see  that  these  collisions  in  the  early  years 
are  perfectly  normal  and  right.  In  the  interests  of 
the  race,  at  any  rate,  we  ought  perhaps  to  regard 
him  as  the  better  child,  as  the  child  of  finer  promise, 
who  will  not  subject  himself  to  human  law  without  a 
considerable  show  of  resistance. 

The  first  and  most  impressive  form  of  resistance 
to  the  laws  of  grown-ups  is  the  use  of  physical  force, 
which  has  already  been  touched  on.  There  is  some- 
thing pathetically  comic  in  the  spectacle  of  these 
mites  resorting  to  the  arbitrement  of  force,  trying 
their  small  hand  at  pushing,  striking,  and  the  like ; 
and  as  we  have  seen  the  effort  is  wont  soon  to  ex- 
haust itself  in  childish  despair. 

As  soon  as  our  authority  begins  to  assert  itself  in 
the  issuing  of  commands  the  child's  disposition  to 
disobey,  that  is  to  have  his  way  rather  than  ours,  is 
apt  to  show  itself  now  and  again  in  decided  refusals. 
When,  let  us  say,  the  nurse  gives  up  pulling  him  from 
the  dirty  pool,  and  bids  him  come  away,  he  may  very 
likely  assert  himself  in  an  eloquent,  "  I  won't,"  or  less 
bluntly,  "  I  can't  come  yet". 

Here,  of  course,  there  may  be  no  wilful  rejection  of 
recognised  law,  but  merely  resistance  to  this  particular 
disagreeable  order  coming  from  this  particular  person. 
Nevertheless  we  must,  I  fear,  admit  that  such  refusals 
to  obey  orders  have  in  them  something  of  true  law- 
lessness. The  whole  attitude  of  the  child  when  he  thus 
"  tries  on  "  defiance  of  commands  is  certainly  sugges- 


Rebel  and  Subject.  T37 

tive  of  the  rebel's  temper.  Nobody  is  so  completely 
reckless  as  the  child-rebel.  When  the  fit  is  on  him 
he  pays  not  the  least  attention  to  the  most  awful  of 
warnings.  One  little  offender  of  four  when  he  was 
reminded  by  his  sister — two  years  older — that  he 
would  be  shut  out  from  heaven  retorted  impiously, 
"I  don't  care";  adding,  for  reasons  best  known  to 
himself,  "  uncle  won't  go — I'll  stay  with  him  ". 

Evading  the  Law. 

In  addition  to  this  first  impressive  form  of  opposi- 
tion there  are  later  ones  which  plainly  show  the  spirit 
of  antagonism.  The  conflict  with  law  now  takes  on 
the  aspect  of  evasion  or  "  trying  it  on  ". 

One  of  the  simplest  of  these  childish  tricks  is  the 
invention  of  an  excuse  for  not  instantly  obeying  a 
command,  as  "Come  here!"  "  Don't  tease  pussy !" 
A  child  soon  finds  out  that  to  say  "  I  won't "  when  he 
is  bidden  to  do  something  is  indiscreet  as  well  as 
vulgar.  He  wants  to  have  his  own  way  without  re- 
sorting to  a  gross  breach  of  good  manners,  so  he  re- 
plies insinuatingly,  "  I's  very  sorry,  but  I's  too  busy," 
or  in  some  such  conciliatory  words.  This  field  of 
invention  offers  a  fine  opportunity  for  the  imaginative 
child.  A  small  boy  of  three  years  and  nine  months 
on  receiving  from  his  nurse  the  familiar  order,  "  Come 
here!"  at  once  replied,  "  I  can't,  nurse,  I's  looking  for 
a  flea,"  and  pretended  to  be  much  engrossed  in  the 
momentous  business  of  hunting  for  this  quarry  in  the 
blanket  of  his  cot.  The  little  trickster  is  such  a  lover 
of  fun  that  he  is  pretty  certain  to  betray  his  ruse  in  a 
case  like  this,  and  our  small  flea-catcher,  we  are  told, 
10 


138  Children's  Ways. 

laughed  mischievously  as  he  proffered  his  excuse. 
Such  sly  fabrications  may  be  just  as  naughty  as  the 
uninspired  excuses  of  a  stupidly  sulky  child,  but  it  is 
hard  to  be  quite  as  much  put  out  by  them. 

It  is  a  further  refinement  when  the  staunch  little 
lover  of  liberty  sets  about  "  easing "  the  pressure  of 
commands.  If,  for  example,  he  is  told  to  keep 
perfectly  quiet  because  mother  or  father  wants  to 
sleep,  he  will  prettily  plead  for  the  reservation  of 
whispering  ever  so  softly.  If  he  is  forbidden  to  ask 
for  things  at  the  table  he  will  resort  to  sly  indirect  re- 
minders of  what  he  wants,  as  when  a  boy  of  five  and 
a  half  years  whispered  audibly :  "  I  hope  somebody 
will  offer  me  some  more  soup,"  or  when  a  girl  of  three 
and  a  half  years,  with  more  subtle  insinuation,  observed 
on  seeing  the  elder  folk  eating  cake  :  "  I  not  asking". 

A  like  astuteness  will  show  itself  in  meeting  the 
dismal  accusations  and  scoldings.  Sometimes  the 
fault-finding  is  daringly  ignored,  and  the  small  culprit, 
after  keeping  up  an  excellent  appearance  of  listening, 
proceeds  in  the  most  artless  way  to  talk  about  some- 
thing more  agreeable,  or,  what  is  worse,  to  criticise  the 
manner  of  his  correction  ;  as  when  a  small  boy  inter- 
rupted his  mother's  well-prepared  homily  by  remark- 
ing :  "  Mamma,  when  you  talk  you  don't  move  your 
upper  jaw  ". 

In  cases  in  which  no  attempt  is  made  to  ignore  the 
accusation,  the  small  wits  are  wont  to  be  busy  dis- 
covering exculpations.  Here  we  have  the  ruses, 
often  crude  enough,  by  which  the  little  culprit  tries 
to  shake  off  moral  responsibility,  to  deny  the  author- 
ship of  the  "  naughty  "  action.  The  blame  is  put  on 
anybody  or  anything — if  there  is  no  other  scape-goat 


Rebel  and  Subject.  139 

in  view,  then  on  the  hands  or  other  "  bodily  agents  ". 
This  last  device  is  sometimes  hit  upon  very  early, 
as  when  a  mite  of  two  who  was  told  to  stop  crying 
gasped  out  :  "  Elsie  cry — not  Elsie  cry — tears  cry 
— naughty  tears ! "  We  find  too  at  an  early  age 
a  suggestion  of  fatalism,  as  when  a  boy  of  three  who 
was  blamed  for  not  eating  his  crusts,  and  his  pro- 
cedure contrasted  with  that  of  his  virtuous  sire,  re- 
marked :  "  Yes,  but,  papa,  you  see  God  had  made 
you  and  me  different ". 

Next  to  these  denials  of  the  "  naughty  "  action  come 
attempts  at  justification.  Sometimes  these  look  like 
pitiful  examples  of  quibbling.  A  boy  had  been  rough 
with  his  baby  brother.  His  mother  chid  him,  telling 
him  he  might  hurt  baby.  He  then  asked  his  mother, 
"  Isn't  he  my  own  brother?"  and  on  his  mother  ad- 
mitting so  incontestable  a  proposition,  exclaimed 
triumphantly,  "  Well,  you  said  I  could  do  what  I 
liked  with  my  own  things ".  At  other  times  they 
have  a  dreadful  look  of  being  fibs  invented  for  the 
purpose  of  covering  a  fault.  Under  a  severe  mode  of 
discipline  a  child  is  apt,  as  already  hinted,  to  slip  over 
the  boundary  line  of  truth  in  his  self-protective  efforts 
to  escape  blame  and  punishment. 

One  other  illustration  of  this  keen  childish  dialectic 
when  face  to  face  with  the  accuser  deserves  to  be 
touched  on.  The  sharpened  faculties  have  something 
of  a  lawyer's  quickness  in  detecting  a  flaw  in  the  in- 
dictment. Any  exaggeration  into  which  a  feeling  of 
indignation  happens  to  betray  the  accuser  is  instantly 
pounced  upon.  If,  for  example,  a  child  is  scolded  for 
pulling  kitty's  ears  and  making  her  cry  it  is  enough 
for  the  little  stickler  for  accuracy  to  be  able  to  say : 


140  Children's  Ways. 

'*  I  wasn't  pulling  kitty's  ears,  I  was  only  pulling  one 
of  her  ears  ".  The  ability  to  deny  the  charge  in  its 
initial  form  gives  him  a  great  advantage,  and  robs 
the  accusation  in  its  amended  form  of  much  of  its 
sting.  Whence,  by  the  way,  one  may  infer  that  wis- 
dom in  managing  children  shows  itself  in  nothing 
more  than  in  a  scrupulous  exactness  in  the  use  of 
words. 

The  Plea  for  Liberty. 

While  there  are  these  isolated  attacks  on  various 
points  of  the  daily  discipline,  we  see  now  and  again  a 
bolder  line  of  action  in  the  shape  of  a  general  protest 
against  its  severity.  Sometimes  the  parental  authority 
is  contrasted  unfavourably  with  that  of  some  other 
mother.  The  small  boy  who  invented  a  family,  viz.^ 
a  mother  called  Mrs.  Cock  and  her  little  boys,  fre- 
quently referred  to  this  lady  for  the  purpose  of  giving 
point  to  protests  against  the  severity  of  the  real 
mother.  "For  instance  (writes  the  latter)  when  mother 
refuses  her  paint-box  as  a  plaything,  or  declines  to 
supply  unlimited  note-paper  for  '  scwibbleation,'  a 
reproachful  little  voice  is  heard,  '  Mrs.  Cock  always 
gives  her  paint-box  and  all  her  paper  to  my  little 
boys'.  A  pause.  Then  follows  suggestively:  '  I  fink 
she  loves  them  vewy  much '."  ^  On  the  other  hand, 
if  the  child  accepts  the  mother's  plea,  that  she  has  to 
impose  restraints  because  she  is  a  good  mother,  he  is 
apt  to  wish  that  she  were  a  shade  less  good.  A  boy 
of  four  had  one  morning   to  remain  in  bed  till  ten 

^  From  a  published  article  by  Mrs.  Robert  Jardine  (compare  abovCt 
pp.  16,  17). 


Rebel  and  Subject.  141 

o'clock  as  a  punishment  for  misbehaviour.  He  pro- 
ceeded to  address  his  mother  in  this  wise  :  "  If  I  had 
any  little  children  I'd  be  a  worse  mother  than  you — 
I'd  be  quite  a  bad  mother ;  I'd  let  the  children  get  up 
directly  I  had  done  my  breakfast  at  any  rate  ". 

Enough  has  been  said  to  illustrate  the  ways  in 
which  the  natural  child  kicks  against  the  imposition 
of  restraints  on  his  free  activity.  He  begins  by 
showing  himself  an  open  foe  to  authority.  For  a 
long  time  after,  while  making  a  certain  show  of  sub- 
mission, he  harbours  in  his  breast  something  of  the 
rebel's  spirit.  He  does  his  best  to  evade  the  most 
galling  parts  of  the  daily  discipline,  and  displays  an 
admirable  ingenuity  in  devising  excuses  for  apparent 
acts  of  insubordination.  And,  lastly,  where  candour 
is  permitted,  he  is  apt  to  prove  himself  an  exceedingly 
acute  critic  of  the  system  which  is  imposed  on  him. 

All  this,  moreover,  seems  to  show  that  a  child  ob- 
jects not  only  to  the  particular  administration  under 
which  he  happens  to  live,  but  to  all  law  as  implying 
restraints  on  free  activity.  Thus,  from  the  child's 
point  of  view,  so  far  as  we  have  yet  examined  it, 
punishment  as  such  is  a  thing  which  ought  not  to  be. 

So  strong  and  deep-reaching  is  this  antagonism  to 
law  and  its  restraints  apt  to  be  that  the  common  long- 
ing to  be  "  big  "  is,  I  believe,  largely  grounded  on  the 
expectation  of  liberty.  To  be  big  seems  to  the  child 
more  than  anything  else  to  be  able  to  do  what  one 
likes  without  interference  from  others.  "  Do  you 
know,"  asked  a  little  fellow  of  four  years,  "what  I 
shall  do  when  I'm  a  big  man  ?  I'll  go  to  a  shop  and 
buy  a  bun  and  pick  out  all  the  currants."  One  must 
have  left  in  him  much  of  the  child  in  order  to  under- 


142  Children's  Ways. 

stand  the  fascination  of  that  forbidden  pleasure  of 
daintily  selecting  the  currants. 


{b)  On  the  Side  of  Law, 

If,  however,  we  look  closer  we  shall  find  that  this 
hostility  is  not  the  whole,  perhaps  not  the  most  funda- 
mental part,  of  a  child's  attitude  towards  law.  It  is 
evident  that  the  early  criticism  of  parental  govern- 
ment referred  to  above,  so  far  from  implying  rejection 
of  all  rule,  plainly  implies  its  acceptance.  Some  of 
the  earliest  and  bitterest  protests  against  interference 
are  directed  against  what  looks  to  the  child  irregular 
or  opposed  to  law,  as  when,  for  example,  he  is  allowed 
for  some  time  to  use  a  pair  of  scissors  as  a  plaything, 
and  is  then  suddenly  deprived  of  it.  And  does  not 
all  the  exercise  of  childish  ingenuity  in  excuses  imply 
in  an  indirect  way  that  if  he  had  done  what  is  de- 
scribed in  the  indictment  it  would  be  naughty  and 
deserving  of  punishment  ? 

Other  facts  in  early  life  bear  out  the  conjecture  that 
a  child  has  law-abiding  as  well  as  law-resisting  im- 
pulses. I  think  we  may  often  discern  evidence  of 
this  in  his  suffering  when  in  disgrace.  When  he 
is  too  young  perhaps  to  feel  the  shame,  he  will  feel, 
and  acutely  too,  the  estrangement,  the  loneliness, 
the  sudden  shrinkage  of  his  beloved  world.  The 
greater  the  love  and  the  dependence,  the  greater  will 
be  this  feeling  of  devastation.  The  same  little  boy 
who  said  to  his  mother:  "I'd  be  a  v/orse  mother," 
emarked  to  her  a  few  months  later  that  if  he  could 
say  what  he  liked  to  God  it  would  be :  "  Love  me 
when  I'm  naughty". 


Rebel  and  Subject.  143 

There  is,  perhaps,  in  this  childish  suffering  often 
something  more  than  the  sense  of  being  homeless  and 
outcast.  A  child  of  four  or  five  may,  I  conceive,  when 
suffering  disgrace  have  a  dim  consciousness  of  having 
broken  with  his  normal  orderly  self,  of  having  set 
at  defiance  that  which  he  customarily  honours  and 
obeys. 

Now  this  setting  up  of  an  orderly  law-abiding  self 
seems  to  me  to  imply  that  there  are  impulses  which 
make  for  order.  A  child,  as  I  understand  the  little 
sphinx,  is  at  once  the  subject  of  ever-changing  caprices 
— whence  the  delight  in  playful  defiance  of  all  rule 
and  order — and  the  reverer  of  custom,  precedent,  rule. 
And,  as  I  conceive,  this  reverence  for  precedent  and 
rule  is  the  deeper  and  the  stronger  impulse. 

The  Young  Stickler  for  the  Proprieties. 

I  believe  that  those  who  know  young  children  will 
agree  with  me  that  they  show  an  instinctive  respect 
for  what  is  customary  and  according  to  rule,  such  as 
a  particular  way  of  taking  food,  dressing,  and  definite 
times  for  doing  this  and  that.  Nor  can  we  regard 
this  as  merely  a  reflection  of  our  respect  for  law,  for 
as  we  shall  presently  see  it  reaches  far  beyond  the 
limits  of  the  rules  laid  down  by  adults.  It  seems  to 
be  a  true  instinct  which  comes  before  education  and 
makes  education  possible.  It  is  related  to  habit,  the 
great  principle  which  runs  through  the  whole  of  life. 

The  first  crude  manifestation  of  this  disposition  to 
make  rule  is  seen  in  the  insistence  on  the  customary, 
as  to  the  places  of  things,  the  order  of  procedure  at 
meals  and  such  like.     The  little  boy  of  two,  often 


144  Children's  Ways. 

quoted  here,  showed  a  punctih'ous  feeh'ng  for  order  in 
the  placing  of  things.  He  protested  one  morning  in 
his  mother's  bedroom  against  a  hair-brush  being 
placed  on  the  washing-stand  near  the  tooth-brushes, 
saying  quaintly :  "That  toof-brush  is  a  brush  one". 
Older  children  are  apt  to  be  sticklers  for  order  at 
the  meal-table :  thus,  the  cup  and  the  spoon  have  to 
be  put  in  precisely  the  right  place.  Similarly,  the 
sequences  of  the  day,  e.g.,  the  lesson  before  the  walk, 
the  walk  before  bed,  have  to  be  rigorously  observed. 
This  feeling  for  order  may  develop  itself  even  where 
the  system  of  parental  government  is  by  no  means 
characterised  by  rigorous  insistence  on  such  minutiae 
of  procedure. 

This  impulse  to  extend  rule  appears  more  plainly 
in  many  of  the  little  ceremonial  observances  of  the 
child.  Very  charmingly  is  this  respect  for  rule 
exhibited  in  all  dealings  with  animals,  also  dolls  and 
other  pets.  Not  only  are  they  required  to  do  things 
in  a  proper  orderly  manner,  but  people  have  to  treat 
them  with  due  deference.  One  little  fellow  when  saying 
good-night  to  his  mother  insisted  on  her  going  through 
with  his  doll  precisely  the  same  round  of  kissing  and 
hand-shaking  that  he  required  in  his  own  case. 

This  jealous  regard  for  ceremony  and  the  proprieties 
of  behaviour  is  seen  in  the  enforcement  of  rules  of 
politeness  by  children  who  will  extend  them  far  be- 
yond the  scope  intended  by  the  parent.  A  delightful 
instance  of  this  fell  under  my  own  observation,  as  I 
was  walking  on  Hampstead  Heath.  It  was  a  spring 
day,  and  the  fat  buds  of  the  chestnuts  were  bursting 
into  magnificent  green  plumes.  Two  well-dressed 
"misses,"  aged,  I  should  say,  about  nine  and  eleven, 


Rebel  and  Subject.  1 45 

were  taking  their  correct  morning  walk.  The  elder 
called  the  attention  of  the  younger  to  one  of  the  trees, 
pointing  to  it.  The  younger  exclaimed  in  a  highly 
shocked  tone  :  "  Oh,  Maud  (or  was  it  *  Mabel '  ?),  you 
know  you  shouldn't  point !  " 

The  domain  of  prayer  well  illustrates  the  same 
tendency.  The  child  is  wont,  as  we  have  seen,  to 
think  of  God  as  a  very,  very  grand  person,  and 
naturally,  therefore,  extends  to  him  all  the  courtesies 
he  knows  of.  Thus  he  must  be  addressed  politely 
with  the  due  forms,  "Please,"  "If  you  please,"  and 
the  like.  The  German  child  shrinks  from  using  the 
familiar  form  "  Du  "  in  his  prayers.  As  one  maiden 
of  seven  well  put  it  in  reply  to  a  question  why  she 
used  "  Sie  "  (the  polite  form  of  "  you  ")  in  her  prayers  : 
"  Ich  werde  doch  den  lieben  Gott  nicht  Du  nennen : 
ich  kenne  ihn  ja  gar  nicht "  (But  I  mustn't  call  God 
"thou":  I  don't  know  him,  you  see).  On  the  other 
hand,  God  must  not  be  kept  waiting.  "  Oh,  mamma," 
said  a  little  boy  of  three  years  and  eight  months 
(the  same  that  was  so  insistent  about  the  kissing  and 
hand-shaking),  "  how  long  you  have  kept  me  awake 
for  you  ;  God  has  been  wondering  so  whenever  I  was 
going  to  say  my  prayers."  All  the  words  must  be 
nicely  said  to  him.  A  little  boy,  aged  four  and  three- 
quarter  years,  once  stopped  in  the  middle  of  a  prayer 
and  asked  his  mother :  "  Oh !  how  do  you  spell  that 
word  ? "  The  question  is  curious  as  suggesting  that 
the  child  may  have  regarded  his  silent  communication 
to  the  far-off  King  as  a  kind  of  letter. 

The  Enforcer  of  Rules. 
Not  only  do  children  thus  of  themselves  extend  the 


146  Children's  Ways. 

scope  of  our  commands,  they  show  a  disposition  to 
make  rules  for  themselves.  If,  after  being  told  to  do  a 
thing  on  a  single  occasion  only,  a  child  is  found  repeat- 
ing the  action  on  other  occasions,  this  seems  to  show 
the  germ  of  a  law-making  impulse.  A  little  boy  of 
two  years  and  one  month  was  once  asked  to  give  a 
lot  of  old  toys  to  the  children  of  the  gardener.  Some 
time  after,  on  receiving  some  new  toys,  he  put  away, 
of  his  own  accord,  his  old  ones  as  before  for  the  less 
fortunate  children. 

That  the  instinct  for  order  assists  moral  discipline 
may  be  seen  in  the  fact  that  children  are  apt  to  pay 
enormous  deference  to  our  rules.  Nothing  is  more 
suggestive  here  than  their  talk  among  themselves,  the 
emphasis  they  are  wont  to  lay  on  the  "  must "  and 
"must  not".  The  truth  is  that  children  have  a 
tremendous  belief  in  the  sacredness  of  rules. 

This  recognition  of  the  absolute  imperativeness  of 
a  rule  properly  laid  down  by  the  recognised  authority 
is  seen  in  the  frequent  insistence  on  its  observance 
in  new  circumstances.  It  has  been  pointed  out  by 
Professor  Preyer  that  a  child  of  two  years  and  eight 
months  will  follow  out  the  prohibitions  of  the  mother 
when  he  falls  into  other  hands,  sternly  protesting,  for 
example,  against  the  nurse  giving  him  the  forbidden 
knife  at  table.  Very  proper  children  rather  like  to 
instruct  their  aunts  and  other  ignorant  persons  as  to 
the  right  way  of  dealing  with  them,  and  will  rejoice 
in  the  opportunity  of  setting  them  straight  even  when 
it  means  a  deprivation  for  themselves.  The  self-deny- 
ing ordinance,  "  Mamma  doesn't  let  me  have  many 
sweets,"  is  by  no  means  beyond  the  powers  of  a  very 
correct  little  person. 


Rebel  and  Subject.  147 

A  still  clearer  evidence  of  this  respect  for  law  as 
such,  apart  from  its  particular  enforcement  by  the 
parent,  is  supplied  by  children's  way  of  extending  the 
rules  imposed  on  themselves  to  others.  No  trait  is 
better  marked  in  the  normal  child  than  the  impulse  to 
subject  others  to  his  own  disciplinary  system.  With 
what  amusing  severity  are  they  wont  to  lay  down 
the  law  to  their  dolls,  and  to  their  animal  playmates, 
subjecting  them  to  precisely  the  same  prohibitions 
and  punishments  as  those  to  which  they  themselves 
are  subject !  Nor  do  they  stop  here.  They  enforce 
the  duties  just  as  courageously  on  their  human  elders. 
A  mite  of  eighteen  months  went  up  to  her  elder 
sister,  who  was  crying,  and  with  perfect  mimicry  of 
the  nurse's  corrective  manner,  said  :  "  Hush  !  hush ! 
papa  1 "  pointing  at  the  same  time  to  the  door. 

This  judicial  bent  of  the  child  is  a  curious  one  and 
often  develops  a  priggish  fondness  for  setting  others 
morally  straight.  Small  boys  have  to  endure  much 
in  this  way  from  the  hands  of  slightly  older  sisters 
proficient  in  matters  of  law  and  delighting  to  enforce 
the  moralities.  But  sometimes  the  sisters  lapse  into 
naughtiness,  and  then  the  small  boys  have  their 
chance.  They  too  can  on  such  occasions  be  priggish 
if  not  downright  hypocritical.  A  little  boy  had  been 
quarrelling  with  his  sister  named  Muriel  just  before 
going  to  bed.  On  kneeling  down  to  say  his  prayers 
and  noticing  that  Muriel  was  sitting  near  and  listening, 
he  prayed  aloud  in  this  wise,  "  Please,  God,  make 
Muriel  a  good  girl,"  then  looked  up  and  said  in  an 
angry  voice,  "  Do  you  hear  that,  Muriel  ?  "  and  after 
this  digression  resumed  his  petition. 

This  mania  for  correction  shows  itself  too  in  rela- 


148  Children's  Ways. 

tion  to  the  authorities  themselves.  A  collection  of 
rebukes  and  expositions  of  moral  precept  supplied  by 
children  to  their  erring  parents  would  be  amusing 
and  suggestive.  Here  is  an  example  :  A  boy  of  two 
— the  moral  instruction  of  parents  by  the  child  begins 
betimes — would  not  go  to  sleep  when  bidden  to  do  so 
by  his  father  and  mother.  At  length  the  father,  losing 
patience,  addressed  him  with  a  man's  fierce  emphasis. 
This  mode  of  admonition  so  far  from  cowering  the 
child  simply  offended  his  sense  of  propriety,  for  he  re- 
joined :  "  You  s'ouldn't,  s'ouldn't,  Assum  {i.e.,  *  Arthur,' 
the  father's  name),  you  s'ould  speak  nicely  ". 

We  may  now  turn  to  what  some  will  regard  as  still 
clearer  evidence  of  a  law-fearing  instinct  in  children, 
viz.,  their  spontaneous  self-submission  to  its  com- 
mands. We  are  apt  to  think  of  these  little  ones  as 
doing  right  only  when  under  compulsion  :  but  this  is 
far  from  the  truth.  A  very  young  child  will  show 
the  germ  of  a  disposition  freely  to  adopt  a  law.  A 
little  girl,  when  only  twenty  months  old,  would,  when 
left  by  her  mother  alone  in  a  room,  say  to  herself: 
"  Tay  dar  "  (Stay  there).  About  the  same  time,  after 
being  naughty  and  squealing  "  like  a  railway-whistle," 
she  would  after  each  squeal  say  in  a  deep  voice,  "  Be 
dood,  Babba  "  (her  name).  In  like  manner  the  little 
boy  often  quoted  at  the  age  of  twenty  months  said 
to  himself  when  walking  down  the  garden,  "  Sonny 
darling,  mind  nettles ".  Here,  no  doubt,  we  see 
quaint  mimicries  of  the  mother's  fashion  of  control, 
but  they  seem,  too,  to  indicate  a  movement  in  the 
direction  of  self-control. 

Very  instructive  here  is  the  way  in  which  children 
will  voluntarily  come  and  submit  themselves  to  our 


Rebel  and  Subject.  149 

discipline.  The  girl  just  quoted,  when  less  than  two 
years  old,  would  go  to  her  mother  and  confess  some 
piece  of  naughtiness  and  suggest  the  punishment. 
A  little  boy  aged  two  years  and  four  months  was 
deprived  of  a  pencil  from  Thursday  to  Sunday  for 
scribbling  on  the  wall-paper.  His  punishment  was, 
however,  tempered  by  permission  to  draw  when  taken 
downstairs.  On  Saturday  he  had  finished  a  picture 
downstairs  which  pleased  him.  When  his  nurse 
fetched  him  she  wanted  to  look  at  the  drawing,  but 
the  boy  strongly  objected,  saying :  "  No,  Nanna  (name 
for  nurse),  look  at  it  till  Sunday  ".  And  sure  enough 
when  Sunday  came,  and  the  pencil  was  restored  to 
him,  he  promptly  showed  nurse  his  picture. 

That  there  is  this  tendency  to  fall  in  with  punish- 
ment for  breach  of  rule  is  borne  out  by  some  recent 
questionings  of  school  children  in  America  as  to  their 
views  of  the  justice  of  their  punishments.  The  results 
appear  to  show  that  they  regard  a  large  part  of  their 
corrections  for  naughtiness  as  a  matter  of  course, 
the  younger  ones  being  apparently  harsher  in  their 
views  of  what  constitutes  a  proper  punishment  than 
the  older  ones. 

These  evidences  of  an  impulse  to  look  on  correction 
as  a  quite  proper  thing  are  corroborated  by  stories  of 
self-punishment.  Here  is  an  example  :  A  girl  of  nine 
had  been  naughty,  and  was  very  sorry  for  her  misbe- 
haviour. Shortly  after  she  came  to  her  lesson  limping, 
and  remarked  that  she  felt  very  uncomfortable.  Being 
asked  by  her  governess  what  was  the  matter  with 
her  she  said  :  "  It  was  very  naughty  of  me  to  disobey 
you,  so  I  put  my  right  shoe  on  to  my  left  foot  and 
my  left  shoe  on  to  my  right  foot ". 


150  Children's  Ways. 

The  facts  here  briefly  illustrated  seem  to  me  to 
show  that  there  is  in  the  child  from  the  first  a  rudiment 
of  true  law-abidingness,  which  exists  side  by  side  and 
struggles  with  the  childish  love  of  liberty  and  re- 
belliousness. And  this  is  a  force  of  the  greatest  con- 
sequence to  the  disciplinarian.  It  is  something  which 
takes  side  in  the  child's  breast  with  the  reasonable 
governor  and  the  laws  which  he  or  she  administers. 
It  secures  in  many  cases,  at  least,  a  ready  compliance 
with  a  large  part  of  the  discipline  enforced. 


CHAPTER  XI. 

AT  THE  GATE  OF  THE  TEMPLE. 

One  of  the  most  interesting  phases  of  a  child's  ac- 
tivity is  its  groping  after  what  we  call  art.  Although  a 
decided  bent  towards  some  special  form  of  our  art  may- 
be rare  among  children,  most  of  them  betray  some 
rudiment  of  a  feeling  for  beauty  and  of  an  impulse 
to  produce  it.  It  will  be  well  to  begin  by  glancing  at 
the  responses  of  children  to  the  various  presentations 
of  beauty  in  nature  and  art,  and  then  to  examine 
their  attempts  at  artistic  production. 

The  Greeting  of  Beauty. 

In  looking  in  a  young  child  for  responses  to  the 
beauty  of  things,  we  must  not,  of  course,  expect  a  clear 
appreciation  of  its  several  phases.  Here  our  aim  will 
be  to  collect  evidences  of  a  natural  feeling  which  may 
afterwards  under  favourable  conditions  grow  into  a 
discerning  taste. 

Even  in  infancy  we  may  detect  in  the  movements 
of  the  arms,  the  admiring  cooing  sounds,  this  greeting 
of  nature's  beauty  as  of  something  kindred.  In  the 
home  interior  it  is  commonly  some  bit  of  bright  light, 
especially  when  it  is  in  movement,  which  first  charms 
the  eye  of  the  novice  ;  the  dancing  fire-flame,  for  ex- 
ample, the  play  of  the  sunlight  on  a  bit  of  glass  or  a 


152  Children's  Ways. 

gilded  frame,  the  great  globe  of  the  lamp  just  created. 
In  some  cases  it  is  a  patch  of  bright  colour  or  a  gay 
pattern  on  the  mother's  dress  which  calls  forth  a  full 
vocal  welcome  in  the  shape  of  baby  "  talking ".  In 
the  out-of-door  scene,  too,  it  is  the  glitter  of  the 
running  water,  or  a  meadow  all  white  with  daisies, 
which  captivates  the  glance.  Light,  the  symbol  of 
life's  joy,  seems  to  be  the  first  language  in  which  the 
spirit  of  beauty  speaks  to  a  child. 

A  feeling  for  the  charm  of  colour  comes  distinctly 
later.  The  first  pleasure  from  coloured  toys  and 
pictures  is  hardly  distinguishable  from  the  welcome  of 
the  glad  light,  the  delight  in  mere  brightness.  This 
applies  pretty  manifestly  to  the  strongly  illumined 
rose-red  curtain  which  Professor  Preyer's  boy  greeted 
with  signs  of  satisfaction  at  the  age  of  twenty-three 
days.  Later  on,  too,  when  it  is  possible  to  test  a 
child's  feeling  for  colour,  it  has  been  found  that 
a  decided  preference  is  shown  for  the  bright  or 
"  luminous  "  tints,  viz.,  red  and  yellow.  An  American 
observer,  Miss  Shinn,  tells  us  that  her  niece  in  her 
twenty-eighth  month  had  a  special  fondness  for  the 
daffodils — the  bright  tints  of  which  allured,  as  we  know, 
an  older  maiden,  and,  alas !  to  the  place  whence  all 
brightness  was  banished.  Among  the  other  coloured 
objects  which  captivated  the  eye  of  this  little  girl  were 
a  patch  of  white  cherry  blossom,  and  a  red  sun-set 
sky.  Such  observations  might  easily  be  multiplied. 
Whiteness,  it  is  to  be  noted,  comes,  as  we  might 
expect,  with  the  brighter  tones  of  the  other  colours 
among  the  first  favourites. 

At  what  age  a  child  begins  to  appreciate  the  value 
of  colour  as  colour,  to  like  blue  or  red  for  its  own 


At  the  Gate  of  the  Temple.  153 

sake  and  apart  from  its  brightness,  it  is  hard  to  say. 
The  experiments  made  so  far  are  not  conclusive, 
though  they  seem  to  show  that  taste  for  colour  does 
not  always  develop  along  the  same  lines.  Thus, 
according  to  the  observer  of  one  child,  blue  is  one  of 
the  first  to  be  preferred,  though  this  is  said  not  to 
be  true  of  other  children.  Later  on,  I  believe,  a 
child  is  wont  to  have  his  favourite  colour,  and  to  be 
ready  to  defend  it  against  the  preferences  of  others. 

Liking  for  a  single  colour  is  a  considerably  smaller 
display  of  mind  than  an  appreciation  of  the  relation 
of  two  colours.  Many  adults,  it  is  said,  hardly  have 
a  rudiment  of  this  feeling,  pairing  the  most  fiercely 
antagonistic  tints.  Common  observation  shows  that 
most  children,  like  the  less  cultivated  adults,  prefer 
juxtapositions  of  colours  which  are  strongly  opposed, 
such  as  blue  and  red  or  blue  and  yellow.  It  would 
be  interesting  to  know  whether  there  is  any  general 
preference  as  between  these  two  combinations.  It  is, 
of  course,  a  long  step  from  this  recognition  of  the 
contrast  and  mutual  emphasising  of  colour  to  that  of 
its  quiet  harmonious  combinations. 

That  little  children  have  their  likings  in  the  matter 
of  form  is,  I  think,  indisputable,  but  they  are  not  those 
of  the  cultivated  adult.  One  of  the  first  out-goings 
of  admiration  towards  form  is  the  child's  praise 
of  "tiny"  things.  The  common  liking  of  children 
for  small  natural  forms,  e.g.,  those  of  the  lesser  birds, 
insects,  and  sea-shells,  is  well  known.  How  they  love 
to  "  pile  up  "  the  endearing  epithets  "  wee,"  "  tiny"  (or 
"teeny"),  and  the  rest!  Here,  as  in  so  many  of 
these  childish  admirations,  we  have  to  do  not  with 
a  purely  aesthetic  perception.      The  feeling  for  the 


154  Children's  Ways. 

tiny  things  probably  has  in  it  the  warmth  of  a  young 
personal  sympathy. 

If  now  we  turn  to  the  higher  aspects  of  form,  such 
as  symmetry  and  proportion,  we  encounter  a  difficulty. 
A  child  may  acquire  while  quite  young  and  before  any 
methodical  education  commences  a  certain  feeling  for 
regular  form.  But  can  we  be  sure  that  this  is  the  re- 
sult of  his  own  observations  ?  We  have  to  remember 
that  his  daily  life,  where  the  home  is  orderly,  helps  to 
impress  on  him  regularity  of  form.  In  the  laying  of 
the  cloth  on  the  dinner-table,  for  example,  he  sees  the 
regular  division  of  space  enforced  as  a  law.  Every 
time  he  is  dressed,  or  sees  his  mother  dress,  he  has  an 
object-lesson  in  symmetrical  arrangement.  And  so 
these  features  take  on  a  kind  of  moral  rightness  before 
they  are  judged  of  as  pleasing  to  the  eye  and  as 
beautiful.  The  feeling  for  proportion,  as,  for  example, 
between  the  height  of  a  horse  and  that  of  a  house,  is, 
as  children's  drawings  show  us,  in  general  very  defective 

A  susceptibility  to  the  pleasures  of  light,  colour,  and 
certain  simple  aspects  of  form,  may  be  said  to  supply 
the  basis  of  a  crude  perception  of  beauty.  A  quite 
small  child  is  capable  of  acquiring  a  real  admiration 
for  a  beautiful  lady,  in  the  appreciation  of  which 
brightness,  colour,  grace  of  movement,  the  splendour 
of  dress,  all  have  their  part,  while  the  charm  for  the 
eye  is  often  reinforced  by  a  sweet  and  winsome  quality 
of  voice.  Such  an  admiration  is  not  of  course  a  pure 
appreciation  of  beauty :  awe,  some  feeling  for  the 
social  dignity  of  dress,  perhaps  a  longing  to  be  em- 
braced by  the  charmer,  may  all  enter  into  it ;  yet 
delight  in  the  look  of  a  thing  for  its  own  sake  is  surely 
the  core  of  the  feeling. 


At  the  Gate  of  the  Temple.  155 

Perhaps  the  nearest  approach  to  a  pure  aesthetic  en- 
joyment in  these  early  days  is  the  love  of  flowers.  The 
wee  round  wonders  with  their  mystery  of  velvety 
colour  are  well  fitted  to  take  captive  the  young  eye. 
I  believe  most  children  who  live  among  flowers  and 
have  access  to  them  acquire  something  of  this  senti- 
ment, a  sentiment  in  which  admiration  for  beautiful 
things  combines  with  a  kind  of  dumb  childish  sympa- 
thy. No  doubt  there  are  marked  differences  among 
children  here.  There  are  some  who  care  only,  or 
mainly,  for  their  scent,  and  the  keen  sensibilities  of 
the  olfactory  organ  appear  to  have  a  good  deal  to  do 
with  early  preferences  and  prejudices  in  the  matter  of 
flowers.  Others  again  care  for  them  mainly  as  a 
means  of  personal  adornment,  though  I  am  disposed 
to  think  that  this  partially  interested  fondness  is  less 
common  with  children  than  with  many  adults. 

In  much  of  this  first  crude  utterance  of  the  aesthetic 
sense  of  the  child  we  have  points  of  contact  with 
the  manifestations  of  taste  among  uncivilised  races. 
Admiration  for  brilliant  colours,  for  moving  things, 
such  as  feathers,  is  common  to  the  two.  Yet  a  child 
coming  under  the  humanising  influences  of  culture 
soon  gets  far  away  from  the  level  of  the  savage. 
Perhaps  his  almost  perfectly  spontaneous  love  of  tiny 
flowers  is  already  a  considerable  advance  on  his  so- 
called  prototype. 

Many  adults  assume  that  a  child  can  look  at  a  land- 
scape as  they  look  at  it,  taking  in  the  whole  picturesque 
effect.  When  he  is  taken  to  Switzerland  and  shown 
a  fine  "  view,"  his  eye,  so  far  from  seizing  the  whole, 
will  provokingly  pounce  on  some  unimportant  detail 
of  the  scene  and  give  undivided   attention  to  this, 


156  Children's  Ways. 

That  the  eye  of  a  child  of  ten  or  less  can  enjoy  the 
reddening  of  a  snow-peak,  or  the  emergence  of  a  bright 
green  alp  from  the  mountain  mist,  I  fully  believe. 
But  it  is  quite  another  thing  to  expect  him  to  appreci- 
ate great  extent  of  view  and  all  the  unnameable  rela- 
tions of  form,  of  light  and  shade,  and  of  colour,  which 
compose  a  landscape. 

First  Peep  into  the  Art-world. 

While  Nature  is  thus  speaking  to  a  child  through 
her  light,  her  colour  and  her  various  forms,  human  art 
makes  appeal  also.  In  a  cultured  home  a  child  finds 
himself  at  the  precincts  of  the  art-temple,  and  feels 
there  are  wondrous  delights  within  if  he  can  only  get 
there. 

One  of  the  earliest  of  these  appeals  is  to  the  ear. 
A  child  outside  the  temple  of  art  hears  its  music  before 
he  sees  its  veiled  beauties.  I  have  had  occasion  to 
show  how  sadly  new  sounds  may  perturb  the  spirit 
of  an  infant.  Yet  these  same  waves  of  sound,  which 
break  upon  and  shake  the  young  nerves,  give  them, 
too,  their  most  delightful  thrill.  Nowhere  in  adult 
experience  do  pleasure  and  sadness  lie  so  near  one 
another  as  in  music,  and  a  child's  contrasting  responses, 
as  he  now  shrinks  away  with  trouble  in  his  eyes,  now 
gratefully  reaches  forth  and  falls  into  joyous  sympa- 
thetic movement,  are  a  striking  illustration  of  this 
proximity. 

In  the  case  of  many  happy  children  the  interest  in 
the  sounds  of  things,  e.g.,  the  gurgle  of  running  water, 
the  soughing  of  the  trees,  is  a  large  one.  An  ap- 
proach to  aesthetic  pleasure  is  seen  in  the  responses 


At  the  Gate  of  the  Temple.  157 

to  rhythmic  series  of  sounds.  Rhythm,  it  has  been 
well  said,  is  a  universal  law  of  life :  all  the  activities 
of  the  organism  have  their  regular  changes,  their 
periodic  rise  and  fall.  The  rhythm  of  a  simple 
tune  plays  favourably  on  a  child's  ear,  enhancing 
life  according  to  this  great  law.  His  ear,  his  brain, 
his  muscles  take  on  a  new  joyous  activity,  and  the 
tide  of  life  rises  higher.  Nursery  rhymes,  which,  it  has 
recently  been  suggested,  should  be  banished,  bring 
something  of  this  joy  of  ordered  movement,  and  help 
to  form  the  rhythmic  ear. 

With  this  feeling  for  rhythm  there  soon  appears  a 
discerning  feeling  for  quality  of  tone.  First  of  all, 
I  suspect,  comes  the  appreciation  of  moderation  and 
smoothness  of  sound;  it  is  the  violent  sounds 
which  mostly  offend  the  young  ear.  A  child's  pre- 
ference for  the  mother's  singing  is,  perhaps,  a  half 
reminiscence  of  the  soft-low  tones  of  the  lullaby. 
Purity  or  sweetness  of  tone,  little  by  little,  makes 
itself  felt,  and  a  child  takes  dislikes  to  certain  voices 
as  wanting  in  this  agreeable  quality.  Much  later,  in 
the  case  of  all  but  gifted  children,  do  the  mysteries  of 
harmony  begin  to  take  on  definite  form  and  meaning. 

The  arts  which  give  to  the  eye  semblances  or  re- 
presentations of  objects  appeal  to  a  child  much  more 
through  his  knowledge  of  things.  The  enjoyment  of 
a  picture  means  the  understanding  of  it  as  a  picture, 
and  this  requires  a  process  of  self-education.  A  child 
begins  to  make  acquaintance  with  the  images  of  things 
when  set  before  a  mirror.  Here  he  can  inspect  what 
he  sees,  say  the  reflection  of  the  face  of  his  mother 
or  nurse,  and  compare  it  at  once  with  the  original. 

With  pictures    there   is   no   such    opportunity  of 


158  Children's  Ways. 

directly  comparing  with  the  original,  and  children 
have  to  find  out  as  best  they  may  what  the  draw- 
ings in  their  picture-books  mean. 

A  dim  discernment  of  what  a  drawing  represents 
may  appear  early.  A  little  boy  was  observed  to  talk 
to  pictures  at  the  end  of  the  eighth  month,  A  girl  of 
forty-two  weeks  showed  the  same  excitement  at  the 
sight  of  a  life-size  painting  of  a  cat  as  at  that  of  a  real 
cat.  Another  child,  a  boy,  recognised  pictures  of 
animals  by  spontaneously  naming  them  "  bow-wow," 
etc.,  at  the  age  of  ten  months. 

The  early  recognition  of  pictured  objects,  of  which 
certain  animals  have  a  measure,  is  often  strikingly 
discerning.  A  child  a  little  more  than  a  year  old  has 
been  known  to  pick  out  her  father's  face  in  a  group 
of  nine,  the  face  being  scarcely  more  than  a  quarter 
of  an  inch  in  diameter. 

Another  curious  point  in  this  early  deciphering  of 
drawings  and  photographs  is  that  a  child  seems  in- 
different to  the  position  of  the  picture,  holding  it  as 
readily  inverted  as  in  its  proper  position.  One  little 
girl  of  three  and  a  half  "does  not  mind  (writes  her 
father)  whether  she  looks  at  a  picture  the  right  way 
up  or  the  wrong ;  she  points  out  what  you  ask  for, 
eyes,  feet,  hands,  tail,  etc.,  about  equally  well  which- 
ever way  up  the  picture  is,  and  never  asks  to  have  it 
put  right  that  she  may  see  it  better".  A  like  in- 
difference to  the  position  of  a  picture,  and  of  a  letter, 
has  been  observed  among  backward  races. 

Surprising  as  this  early  recognition  of  pictures  un- 
doubtedly is,  it  is  a  question  whether  it  necessarily 
implies  any  idea  of  the  true  nature  of  them,  as  being 
merely  semblances  or  representations  of  things. 


At  the  Gate  of  the  Temple.  159 

That  children  do  not,  at  first,  dearly  seize  the 
meaning  of  pictures  is  seen  in  the  familiar  fact  that 
they  will  touch  them  just  as  they  touch  shadows,  and 
otherwise  treat  them  as  if  they  were  tangible  realities. 
One  little  girl  attempted  to  smell  at  the  trees  in  a 
drawing  and  pretended  to  feed  some  pictorial  dogs. 
This  may  have  been  half  play.  But  here  is  a  more 
convincing  example.  A  girl  was  moved  to  pity  by 
a  picture  of  a  lamb  caught  in  a  thicket,  and  tried  to 
lift  the  branch  that  lay  across  the  animal.  With 
less  intelligent  children  traces  of  this  tendency  to 
take  pictorial  representation  for  reality  may  appear 
as  late  as  four.  One  American  boy  having  looked  at 
a  picture  of  people  going  to  church  in  the  snow, 
and  finding  on  the  next  day  that  the  figures  in 
the  drawing  were  exactly  in  the  same  position, 
seemed  perplexed,  and  remarked  naively :  "  Why, 
Mrs.  C,  these  people  haven't  got  there  yet,  have 
they?" 

It  is  not  surprising  after  this  to  learn  that  some 
children  are  slow  in  seizing  the  representative  char- 
acter of  acting.  If,  for  example,  a  father  at  Christmas- 
tide  disguises  himself  as  Santa  Claus,  his  child  will 
only  too  readily  take  him  to  be  what  he  represents 
himself  to  be,  and  this  when  the  disguise,  especially 
in  the  matter  of  the  voice,  leaves  much  to  be  desired. 
Children,  like  uneducated  adults,  have  been  known 
to  take  a  spectacle  on  the  stage  of  a  theatre  too 
seriously.  Yet  their  own  play,  which,  though  serious 
at  the  moment,  is  known  afterwards  to  be  "pre- 
tending," probably  renders  many  of  them  particularly 
quick  in  interpreting  dramatic  play. 

This  tendency  to  take  art-representations  for  reali- 


i6o  Children's  Ways. 

ties  reappears  even  in  the  mental  attitude  of  a  child 
towards  his  stories.  A  verbal  narrative  has  of  course 
in  itself  nothing  similar  to  the  scenes  and  events  of 
which  it  tells.  In  this  it  differs  from  the  semblance  of 
the  picture  and  of  the  dramatic  spectacle.  Yet  a  story, 
just  because  it  uses  our  common  forms  of  language 
and  takes  the  guise  of  a  narrative  ■  about  people  who 
lived  at  such  a  time  and  place,  may  well  appear  to  a 
child's  mind  to  tell  of  real  events.  At  any  rate  we 
know  that  he  is  wont  to  believe  tenaciously  in  the 
truth  of  his  stories. 

Careful  observations  of  these  first  movements  of  the 
child's  mind  towards  art  will  illustrate  the  variable 
directions  of  his  taste.  The  preferences  of  a  boy  of 
four  in  the  matter  of  picture-books  tell  us  where  his 
special  interests  lie,  what  things  he  finds  pretty,  and 
may  supply  a  hint  as  to  how  much  of  a  genuine 
aesthetic  faculty  he  is  likely  to  develop  later  on. 

It  is  curious  to  note  children's  first  manifestations 
of  a  sense  of  the  pathetic  and  the  comic  as  represented 
in  art.  Here  marked  differences  present  themselves. 
Those  of  a  more  serious  turn  are  apt  to  show  a 
curious  preference  for  the  graver  aspects  of  things. 
They  like  stories,  for  example,  with  a  certain  amount 
of  tension  and  even  of  thrill  in  them.  There  are 
others  who  disclose  a  special  susceptibility  to  the 
more  simple  effects  of  pathos.  There  are  senti- 
mental children,  as  there  are  sentimental  adults,  who 
seem  never  happier  than  when  the  tears  are  ready 
to  start.  It  may  be  suspected  from  the  number  of 
descriptions  of  early  deaths  in  literature  for  the  young 
that  some  at  least  must  take  pleasure  in  this  kind  of 
description.    A  child's  strong  feeling  of  attachment  to 


At  the  Gate  of  the  Temple.  i6i 

animals  is  apt  at  a  certain  age  to  give  to  stories 
about  the  hardships  of  horses  and  the  Hke  something 
of  an  overpowering  sadness. 

The  sense  of  the  comic  in  children  is  a  curious  sub- 
ject to  which  justice  has  not  yet  been  done.  The 
tendency  to  judge  them  by  our  grown-up  standards 
shows  itself  in  an  expectation  that  their  laughter  will 
follow  the  directions  of  our  own.*  Their  fun  is, 
I  suspect,  of  a  very  elemental  character.  They  are 
apt  to  be  tickled  by  the  spectacle  of  some  upsetting 
of  the  proprieties,  some  confusion  of  the  established 
distinctions  of  rank.  Dress,  as  we  have  seen,  has  an 
enormous  symbolic  value  for  their  mind,  and  any 
incongruity  here  is  apt  to  be  specially  laughter-pro- 
voking. One  child  between  three  and  four  was  con- 
vulsed at  the  sight  of  his  baby  bib  fastened  round  the 
neck  of  his  bearded  sire.  There  is,  too,  a  considerable 
element  of  rowdiness  in  children's  sense  of  the  comical, 
as  may  be  seen  by  the  enduring  popularity  of  the 
spectacle  of  Punch's  successful  misdemeanours  and 
bravings  of  the  legal  authority.  The  sense  of  humour 
which  is  finely  percipient  and  half  reflective  is  far 
from  their  level,  as  indeed  it  is  from  that  of  the 
average  adult.  Hence  the  fact  familiar  to  parents  that 
stories  which  treat  of  child-life  with  the  finer  kind 
of  humour  may  utterly  fail  to  tickle  a  young  reader. 

First  Ventures  in  Creation, 

It  is  sometimes  said  that  children  are  artists  in 
embryo,  that  in  their  play  and  throughout  their  activity 
they  manifest  the  germs  of  the  art-impulse.  It  seems 
worth  while  to  examine  the  saying. 


1 62  Children's  Ways. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  in  much  of  the  first  spon- 
taneous activity  there  is  a  trace  of  aesthetic  feel- 
ing and  the  impulse  to  produce  something  pretty. 
Yet  the  feeling  is  in  most  children  weak  and  vacil- 
lating, and  is  wont  to  be  mixed  with  other  and  less 
noble  ones. 

One  of  the  lower  and  mixed  forms  of  artistic 
activity,  in  the  case  of  the  child  and  of  the  race  alike, 
is  personal  adornment.  The  impulse  to  study  ap- 
pearances appears  to  reach  far  down  in  animal  life. 
Two  impulses  seem  to  be  at  work  here  :  to  frighten  or 
overawe  others,  as  seen  in  the  raising  of  feathers  and 
hair  so  as  to  increase  size,  and  to  attract,  which 
possibly  underlies  the  habit  of  trimming  feathers  and 
fur  among  birds  and  quadrupeds.  The  same  two  im- 
pulses are  said  to  lie  at  the  root  of  the  elaborate  art  of 
personal  adornment  developed  by  savages. 

In  the  case  of  children  brought  up  in  the  ways  of 
civilisation  where  personal  cleanliness  and  adornment 
are  peremptorily  enforced  in  the  face  of  many  a  tear- 
ful protest,  it  seems  at  first  vain  to  look  for  the  play 
of  instinctive  tendencies.  Yet  I  think  if  we  observe 
closely  we  shall  detect  traces  of  a  spontaneous  impulse 
towards  self-adornment.  Children,  like  uncultured 
adults,  are  wont  to  prize  a  bit  of  finery  in  the  shape  of 
a  string  of  beads  or  of  daisies  for  the  neck,  a  feather  for 
the  hat,  and  so  forth.  Imitation  of  the  ways  of  their 
elders  doubtless  plays  a  part  here,  but  it  is  aided  by  an 
instinct  for  adornment.  Little  girls  perhaps  repre- 
sent the  attractive  function  of  adornment :  they  like 
to  be  thought  pretty.  Little  boys  when  decking  them- 
selves out  with  tall  hat  and  monstrously  big  clothes 
seem  to  be  trying  to  put  on  an  alarming  aspect. 


At  the  Gate  of  the  Temple.  163 

Since  children  are  left  so  little  free  to  deck  them- 
selves, it  is  of  course  hard  to  study  the  development 
of  aesthetic  taste  in  this  domain  of  their  activity.  Yet 
their  quaint  attempts  to  improve  their  appearance 
throw  an  interesting  side-light  on  their  aesthetic 
preferences.  While  in  general  they  have  in  their 
hearts  almost  as  much  love  of  glitter,  of  gaudy  colour, 
as  uncivilised  adults,  they  betray  striking  differ- 
ences of  feeling  ;  some  developing,  for  example,  a 
bent  towards  modest  neatness  and  refinement,  and 
this,  it  may  be,  in  direct  opposition  to  the  whole 
trend  of  home  influence. 

Another  domain  of  childish  activity  which  is  akin 
to  art  is  the  manifestation  of  grace.  A  good  deal 
of  the  charm  of  movement,  of  gesture,  of  intonation, 
in  a  young  child  may  be  unconscious,  and  as  much  a 
result  of  happy  physical  conditions  as  the  pretty 
gambols  of  a  kitten.  Yet  one  may  commonly  detect 
in  graceful  children  the  rudiment  of  an  aesthetic  feel- 
ing for  what  is  nice,  and  also  of  the  instinct  to  please. 
There  is,  indeed,  in  these  first  actions,  such  as  the  kiss- 
ing of  the  hand  to  other  children  in  the  street,  something 
of  the  simple  grace  and  dignity  of  the  more  amiable 
of  those  uncivilised  races  which  we  dishonour  by 
calling  them  savages.  This  feeling  for  pleasing 
effect  in  bodily  carriage  and  movement,  in  the  use  of 
speech  and  gesture,  is  no  doubt  far  from  being  a  pure 
art-activity.  Traces  of  self-consciousness,  of  vanity, 
are  often  discernible  in  it ;  yet  at  least  it  attests  the 
existence  of  a  certain  appreciation  of  what  is  beauti- 
ful, and  of  something  akin  to  the  creative  impulse  of 
the  artist. 

A  true  art-impulse  is  characterised  by  a  pure  love 


164  Children's  Ways. 

of  doing  something  which,  either  in  itself  as  an  action 
or  in  the  material  result  which  it  produces,  is  beauti- 
ful. Into  this  there  enters,  at  the  moment  at  least, 
no  consciousness  of  self  Now  there  is  one  field  of 
children's  activity  which,  as  was  suggested  in  an 
earlier  chapter,  is  marked  by  just  this  absorption  of 
thought  in  action  for  its  own  sake,  and  that  is  play. 

To  say  that  play  is  art-like  has  almost  become  a 
commonplace.  Like  art  it  is  inspired  and  sustained 
by  a  pure  love  of  producing.  Like  art,  too,  on  its 
representative  side,  play  aims  at  producing  an  imita- 
tion or  semblance  of  something.  The  semblance  may 
be  plastic,  residing  in  the  material  product  of  the 
action,  as  in  making  things  such  as  castles  out  of 
cardboard  or  sand  ;  or  it  may  be  dramatic  and  reside 
in  the  action  itself,  as  in  much  of  the  childish  play 
already  described. 

The  imitative  impulse  prompting  to  the  production 
of  the  semblance  of  something  appears  very  early  in 
child-life.  A  good  deal  of  the  imitation  wh'ch  occurs 
in  the  second  half  year  is  the  taking  on,  under  the 
lead  of  another's  example,  of  actions  which  are  more  or 
less  useful.  This  applies,  for  example,  to  such  actions 
as  waving  the  hand  in  sign  of  farewell,  and  of  course 
to  vocal  imitation  of  others'  verbal  sounds.  At  an 
early  date  we  find,  further,  a  perfectly  useless  kind 
of  imitation  which  is  more  akin  to  that  of  art.  A  quite 
young  child  will,  for  example, /;r/^«^  to  do  something, 
as  to  take  an  empty  cup  and  carry  out  the  semblance 
of  drinking.  The  imitation  of  the  sounds  and  move- 
ments of  animals,  which  comes  early  too,  may  be  said 
to  be  imitative  in  the  more  artistic  sense,  inasmuch  as 
it  has  no  aim  beyond  that  of  mimetic  representation. 


At  the  Gate  of  the  Temple.  165 

Later  on,  towards  the  third  year,  this  simple  type  of 
imitative  action  grows  more  complex,  so  that  a  pro- 
longed make-believe  action  may  be  carried  out.  A 
child,  for  example,  occupies  himself  with  pretending 
to  be  an  organ-grinder's  monkey,  going  duly  and  in 
order  through  the  action  of  jumping  down  from  his 
seat,  and  taking  off  his  cap  by  way  of  begging  for  the 
stranger's  contribution.  Here,  it  is  evident,  we  get 
something  closely  analogous  to  histrionic  performance. 
This  play-like  performance,  again,  gradually  divides 
itself  into  a  more  serious  kind  of  action,  analogous  to 
serious  drama,  and  into  a  lighter  representaation  of 
some  funny  scene,  which  has  in  it  something  akin  to 
comedy. 

Meanwhile,  another  form  of  imitation  is  developing, 
the  fashioning  of  lasting  semblances.  Early  illustra- 
tions of  this  impulse  are  the  making  of  a  river  out  of 
the  gravy  in  the  plate,  the  pinching  of  pellets  of  bread 
till  they  take  on  something  of  resemblance  to  known 
forms.  One  child,  three  years  old,  would  occupy 
himself  at  table  by  turning  his  plate  into  a  clock,  in 
which  the  knife  and  fork  were  made  to  act  as  hands, 
and  cherry  stones  put  round  the  plate  to  represent 
the  hours.  Such  table-pastimes  are  known  to  all 
observers  of  children,  and  have  been  prettily  touched 
on  by  R.  L.  Stevenson  in  his  essay  on  "Child's  Play". 

These  formative  touches  are,  at  first,  rough  enough, 
the  transformation  being  effected,  as  we  have  seen, 
much  more  by  the  alchemy  of  the  child's  imagination 
than  by  the  cunning  of  his  hands.  Yet,  crude  as  it 
is,  and  showing  at  first  almost  as  much  of  chance  as 
of  design,  it  is  a  manifestation  of  the  same  plastic 
impulse  which  possesses  the  sculptor  and  the  painter. 


1 66  Children's  Ways. 

The  more  elaborate  constructive  play  which  follows — 
the  building  with  cards  and  wooden  bricks,  the  mould- 
ing with  sand  and  clay,  and  the  first  spontaneous  draw- 
ings— is  the  direct  descendant  of  this  rude  formative 
activity.  The  kindergarten  is,  indeed,  a  kind  of 
smaller  art-world  where  the  dramatic  and  plastic  im- 
pulses of  the  child  are  led  into  orderly  action. 

In  this  imitative  play  we  see  from  the  first  the 
artistic  tendency  to  set  forth  what  is  characteristic  in 
the  things  represented.  Thus  in  the  unstudied  acting 
of  the  nursery,  the  nurse,  the  coachman,  and  the  rest, 
are  presented  by  a  few  broad  touches  ;  characteristic 
actions,  such  as  pouring  out  the  medicine,  jerking  the 
reins,  being  aided  byone  or  two  rough  accessories,  as  the 
medicine  bottle  or  the  whip.  In  this  way  child's  play, 
like  primitive  art,  shows  a  certain  unconscious  selec- 
tiveness.  It  presents  what  is  constant  and  typical, 
imperfectly  enough  no  doubt  The  same  selection  of 
broadly  distinctive  traits  is  seen  where  some  indi- 
vidual person,  e.g.,  a  particular  newsboy  or  gardener, 
seems  to  be  represented.  A  similar  tendency  to  a 
somewhat  bald  typicalness  of  outline  is  seen  in  the 
first  rude  attempts  of  children  to  construct,  whether 
with  materials  like  cards  or  bricks,  or  with  pencil,  the 
semblance  of  a  house,  a  garden  and  so  forth. 

As  observation  widens  and  grows  finer,  the  first 
bald  representation  becomes  fuller  and  more  life-like. 
A  larger  number  of  distinctive  traits  is  taken  up  into 
the  play.  Thus  the  coachman's  talk  becomes  richer, 
fuller  of  reminiscences  of  the  stable,  etc.,  and  so  colour 
is  given  to  the  dramatic  picture.  Similarly  with  the 
products  of  the  plastic  impulse. 

With  this  more  realistic   tendency  to  exhibit  the 


At  the  Gate  of  the  Temple.  167 

characteristic  with  something  like  concrete  fulness  we 
see  the  germ  at  least  of  the  idealistic  impulse  to 
transcend  the  level  of  common  things,  to  give  promi- 
nence to  what  has  value,  to  touch  the  representation 
with  the  magic  light  of  beauty.  Even  a  small  child 
playing  with  its  coloured  petals  or  its  shells  will 
show  a  rudiment  of  this  artistic  feeling  for  beautiful 
arrangement. 

No  doubt  there  are  striking  variations  among 
children  in  this  respect.  Play  discloses  in  many 
ways  differences  of  feeling  and  ideas :  among  others, 
in  the  unequal  degrees  of  tastefulness  of  the  play 
scene.  Yet  the  presence  of  an  impulse,  however  rudi- 
mentary, to  produce  what  has  beauty  and  charm  for 
the  eye  is  a  fact  which  we  must  recognise. 

Along  with  this  feeling  for  the  sensuous  effect  of 
beauty  we  can  discern  the  beginnings  of  fancy  and 
invention  whereby  the  idea  represented  is  made  more 
prominent  and  potent.  This  tendency,  like  the  others, 
shows  itself  in  a  crude  form  at  first,  as  in  the  earlier  and 
coarser  art  of  the  race.  In  children's  play  we  can  see 
much  of  the  uncultured  man's  love  of  strong  effect. 
The  pathos  of  the  death  of  the  pet  animal  or  of  the 
child  has  to  be  made  obvious  and  strongly  effective 
by  a  mass  of  painful  detail ;  the  comic  incident  must  be 
made  broadly  farcical  by  heavy  touches  of  caricature  ; 
the  excitement  of  perilous  adventure  has  to  be  in- 
tensified by  multiplying  the  menacing  forces  and  the 
thrilling  situations.  Yet  crude  as  are  these  early 
attempts  at  strengthening  the  feebleness  of  the  actual 
they  are  remotely  akin  to  the  idealising  efforts  of 
true  art. 

Nevertheless,  children's  play,  though  akin  to  it,  is 


1 68  Children  s  Ways. 

not  completely  art  As  pointed  out  above,  the  action  in 
a  child's  play  is  not  intended  as  a  dramatic  spectacle. 
The  small  player  is  too  self-centred,  if  I  may  so  say. 
The  scenes  he  acts  out,  the  semblances  he  shapes  with 
his  hands,  are  not  produced,  as  art  is  produced,  for  its 
own  worth's  sake,  but  rather  as  providing  a  new  world 
into  which  he  may  retire  and  enjoy  privacy.  A  child 
in  playing  a  part  does  not  "play"  in  order  to  delight 
others.  "  I  remember,"  writes  R.  L.  Stevenson,  "  as 
though  it  were  yesterday,  the  expansion  of  spirit,  the 
dignity  and  self-reliance,  that  came  with  a  pair  ot 
mustachios  in  burnt  cork  even  when  there  was  none  to 
see!'  The  same  is  true  when  children  play  at  being 
Indians  or  what  not :  they  are  not  "  acting "  in  the 
theatrical  sense  of  the  word. 

While,  then,  one  can  say  that  there  is  something 
akin  to  art  in  the  happy  semi-conscious  activity  of  the 
child  at  play,  we  must  add  that,  for  the  development 
of  the  true  impulse  of  the  artist,  a  good  deal  more  is 
needed.  The  play-impulse  will  only  get  specialised 
into  the  art-impulse  when  it  is  illumined  by  a  growing 
participation  in  the  social  consciousness,  and  by  a  sense 
of  beauty  and  the  aesthetic  worth  of  things  ;  when, 
further,  it  begins  to  concentrate  itself  on  one  mode  of 
imitative  activity,  as,  for  example,  dramatic  represen- 
tation or  drawing. 

I  have  chosen  here  to  deal  with  the  more  spon- 
taneous manifestations  of  an  art-like  impulse  in  chil- 
dren, rather  than  to  describe  their  first  attempts  at 
art  as  we  understand  it.  Here — in  the  case  of  all 
but  those  endowed  with  a  genuine  artistic  talent — we 
are  apt  to  find  too  much  of  the  adult's  educative  in- 
fluence, too  little  of  what  is  spontaneous  and  original 


At  the  Gate  of  the  Temple.  169 

At  the  same  time,  some  of  this  art-activity,  more  par- 
ticularly the  first  weaving  of  stories,  is  characteristic 
enough  to  deserve  a  special  study.  I  have  made  a 
small  collection  of  early  stories,  and  some  of  them  are 
interesting  enough  to  be  quoted.  Here  is  a  quaint 
example  of  the  first  halting  manner  of  a  child  of  two 
and  a  half  years  as  invention  tries  to  get  away  from 
the  sway  of  models :  "  Three  little  bears  went  out  a 
walk,  and  they  found  a  stick,  and  they  poked  the  fire 
with  it,  and  they  poked  the  fire  and  then  went  a 
walk  ".  Soon,  however,  the  young  fancy  is  apt  to 
wax  bolder,  and  then  we  get  some  fine  invention.  A 
boy  of  five  years  and  a  quarter  living  at  the  sea-side 
improvised  as  follows.  He  related  "  that  one  day  he 
went  out  on  the  sea  in  a  lifeboat,  when  suddenly  he 
saw  a  big  whale,  and  so  he  jumped  down  to  catch  it ; 
but  it  was  so  big  that  he  climbed  on  it  and  rode  on  it 
in  the  water,  and  all  the  little  fishes  laughed  so  ". 

With  this  comic  story  may  be  compared  a  more 
serious  not  to  say  tragic  one  from  the  lips  of  a  girl  one 
month  younger,  which  is  characterised  by  an  almost 
equal  fondness  for  the  wonderful.  "A  man  wanted 
to  go  to  heaven  before  he  died.  He  said,  *  I  don't 
want  to  die,  and  I  must  see  heaven  !  '  Jesus  Christ 
said  he  must  be  patient  like  other  people.  He  then 
got  so  angry,  and  screamed  out  as  loud  as  he  could, 
and  kicked  up  his  heels  as  high  as  he  could,  and  they 
(the  heels)  went  into  the  sky,  and  the  sky  fell  down 
and  broke  the  earth  all  to  pieces.  He  wanted  Jesus 
Christ  to  mend  the  earth  again,  but  he  wouldn't,  so 
this  was  a  good  punishment  for  him."  This  last, 
which  is  the  work  of  one  now  grown  into  womanhood 
and  no  longer  a  story-teller,  is  interesting  in  many 
12 


1 70  Children's  Ways. 

ways.  The  wish  to  go  to  heaven  without  dying  is, 
as  I  know,  a  motive  derived  from  child-life.  The 
manifestations  of  displeasure  could,  one  supposes, 
only  have  been  written  by  one  who  was  herself  ex- 
perienced in  the  ways  of  childish  "  tantrums  ".  The 
naive  conception  of  sky  and  earth,  and  lastly  the 
moral  issue  of  the  story,  are  no  less  instructive. 

These  samples  may  serve  to  show  that  in  the  stories 
of  by  no  means  highly  gifted  children  we  come  face  to 
face  with  interesting  traits  of  the  young  mind,  and  can 
study  some  of  the  characteristic  tendencies  of  early 
and  primitive  art.  Of  the  later  efforts  to  imitate 
older  art,  as  verse  writing,  the  same  cannot,  I  think, 
be  said.  Children's  verses,  so  far  as  I  have  come 
across  them,  are  poor  and  stilted,  showing  all  the 
signs  of  the  cramping  effect  of  models  and  rules  to 
which  the  young  mind  cannot  easily  accommodate 
itself,  and  wanting  in  true  childish  inspiration.  No 
doubt,  even  in  these  choking  circumstances,  childish 
feeling  may  now  and  again  peep  out.  The  first  prose 
compositions,  letters  before  all  if  they  may  be  counted 
art,  give  more  scope  for  the  expression  of  this  feeling 
and  the  characteristic  movements  of  young  thought, 
and  might  well  repay  careful  study. 

There  is  one  other  department  of  children's  art  which 
clearly  does  deserve  to  be  studied  with  some  care — 
their  drawing.  And  this  for  the  very  good  reason  that 
it  is  not  wholly  a  product  of  our  influence  and  educa- 
tion, but  shows  itself  in  its  essential  characteristics  as 
a  spontaneous  self-taught  activity  which  takes  its  rise, 
indeed,  in  the  play-impulse.  To  this  I  propose  to  de- 
vote my  next  and  last  chapter. 


CHAPTER  XII. 

FIRST  PENCILLINGS. 

A  child's  first  attempts  at  drawing  are  not  art 
proper,  but  a  kind  of  play.  As  he  sits  at  the  table 
and  covers  a  sheet  of  paper  with  line-scribble  he  is 
wholly  self-centred,  "amusing  himself,"  as  we  say, 
and  caring  nothing  about  the  production  of  a  thing  of 
jEsthetic  value. 

Yet  even  in  this  infantile  scribbling  we  see  a 
tendency  towards  art-production  in  the  effort  of  the 
small  draughtsman  to  make  his  lines  indicative  of 
something  to  another's  eyes,  as  when  he  bids  his 
mother  look  at  the  "man,"  "gee-gee,"  or  what  else 
he  cheerfully  imagines  his  scribble  to  delineate. 
Such  early  essays  to  represent  objects  by  lines, 
though  commonly  crude  enough  and  apt  to  shock 
the  aesthetic  sense  of  the  matured  artist  by  their 
unsightliness,  are  closely  related  to  art,  and  deserve 
to  be  studied  as  a  kind  of  preliminary  stage  of 
pictorial  design. 

In  studying  what  is  really  a  large  subject  it  will  be 
well  for  us  to  narrow  the  range  of  our  inquiry  by 
keeping  to  delineations  of  the  human  figure  and  of 
animals,  especially  the  horse.  These  are  the  favourite 
topics  of  the  child's  pencil,  and  examples  of  them  are 
easily  obtainable. 

As   far   as   possible    I   have    sought    spontaneous 


172  Children's  Ways. 

drawings  of  quite  young  children,  viz.,  from  between 
two  and  three  to  about  six.  In  a  strict  sense,  of 
course,  no  child's  drawing  is  absolutely  spontaneous 
and  independent  of  external  stimulus  and  guidance. 
The  first  attempts  to  manage  the  pencil  are  com- 
monly aided  by  the  mother  or  other  instructor,  who, 
moreover,  is  wont  to  present  a  model  drawing,  and, 
what  is  even  more  important  at  this  early  stage,  to 
supply  model-movements  of  the  arm  and  hand.  In 
most  cases,  too,  there  is  some  sh'ght  amount  of  critical 
inspection,  as  when  she  asks,  "Where  is  papa's 
nose?"  "Where  is  doggie's  tail?"  In  one  case, 
however,  I  have  succeeded  in  getting  drawings  of  a 
little  girl  who  was  carefully  left  to  develop  her  own 
ideas.  Even  in  the  instances  where  adult  super- 
vision is  apt  to  interfere,  we  can,  I  think,  by  patient 
investigation  distinguish  traits  which  are  genuinely 
childish. 

A  child's  drawing  begins  with  a  free  aimless  swing- 
ing of  the  pencil  to  and  fro,  which  movements  produce 
a  chaos  of  slightly  curved  lines.  These  movements 
are  purely  spontaneous,  or,  if  imitative,  are  so  only  in 
the  sense  that  they  follow  roughly  the  directions  of 
another's  pencil. 

In  this  first  line-scribble  there  is  no  serious  inten- 
tion to  trace  a  particular  form.  What  a  child  seems 
to  do  in  this  rough  imitation  of  another's  movements 
is  to  make  a  tangle  of  lines,  more  or  less  straight, 
varied  by  loops,  which  in  a  true  spirit  of  play  he 
makes  believe  to  be  the  semblance  of  "  mamma," 
"pussy,"  or  what  not,  as  in  Fig.  i  {a)  and  {b).  Possi- 
bly in  not  a  few  cases  the  interpretation  first  suggests 
itself  after  the  scribble,  the  child's  fancy  discerning 


First  Pencillings. 


173 


some  faint  resemblance  in  his  formless  tangle  to  a 
human  head,  a  cat's  tail,  and  so  forth. 


Fig.  I  (fl).i 


Fig.  I  {0,.^ 


This  habit  of  scribble  may  persist  after  a  child 
attempts  a  linear  description  of  the  parts  of  an 
object.  Thus  a  little  girl  in  her  fourth  year  when 
asked  to  draw  a  cat  produced  the  two  accompanying 
figures  (Fig.  2  (a)  and  (d)). 

Here  it  is  evident  we  have  a  phase  of  childish  draw- 


Fig.  2  («). 


Fig.  a  (6). 


^  Fig.  I  (a)  is  a  drawing  of  a  man  by  a  child  of  twenty  months, 
reproduced  from  Prof.  M.  Baldwin's  Mental  Development,  p.  84; 
Fig.  I  (6)  is  a  drawing  of  a  man  by  a  child  of  two  years  three 
months,  reproduced  from  an  article  on  children's  drawings  by  Mr, 
H.  T.  Lukens  in  The  Pedagogical  Seminary,  vol.  iv.  (1896). 


174  Children's  Ways. 

ing  which  is  closely  analogous  to  the  symbolism  of 
language.  The  form  of  representation  is  chosen 
arbitrarily  and  not  because  of  its  likeness  to  what 
is  represented.  This  element  of  symbolic  indication 
will  be  found  to  run  through  the  whole  of  childish 
drawing. 

As  soon  as  the  hand  acquires  a  certain  readiness  in 
drawing  lines  and  closed  lines  or  "  outlines,"  and  be- 
gins  to  connect  the  forms  produced  with  the  necessary 
movements,  drawing  takes  on  a  more  intentional 
character.  The  child  now  aims  at  constructing  a 
particular  linear  representation,  that  of  a  man,  a  horse, 
or  what  not.  These  first  attempts  to  copy  in  line  the 
forms  of  familiar  objects  are  among  the  most  curious 
products  of  the  child's  mind  They  follow  standards 
and  methods  of  their  own ;  they  are  apt  to  get 
hardened  into  a  fixed  conventional  manner  which 
may  reappear  even  in  mature  years.  They  exhibit 
with  a  certain  range  of  individual  difference  a  curious 
uniformity,  and  they  have  their  parallels  in  what  we 
know  of  the  first  crude  designs  of  the  untutored 
savage. 

The  Human  Face  Divine. 

It  has  been  wittily  observed  by  an  Italian  writer, 
Signor  Corrado  Ricci,  that  children  in  their  drawings 
reverse  the  order  of  natural  creation  by  beginning  in- 
stead of  ending  with  man.  It  may  be  added  that  they 
start  with  the  most  dignified  part  of  this  crown  of 
creation,  viz.^  the  human  head.  A  child's  attempt 
to  represent  a  man  appears  commonly  to  begin  by 
drawing  a  sort  of  circle  for  the  front  view  of  the  head. 
A  dot  or  two,  sometimes  only  one,  sometimes  as  many 


First  Pencillings. 


175 


Fig.  3-* 


as  five,  are  thrown  in  as  a  rough  way  of  indicating 
the  features. 

I  speak  here  of  the  commoner  form.  There  are 
however  variations  of  this. 
Some  children  draw  a  squarish 
outline  for  head,  but  these  are 
children  at  school.  In  one  case, 
that  of  a  little  girl  aged  three 
years  four  months,  the  outline 
was  not  completed,  the  facial 
features  being  set  between  two 
vertical  columns  of  scribble, 
which  do  duty  for  legs  (Fig.  3). 
Sometimes  the  features  are 
simply  laid  down  without  any 
enclosing  contour  ;  and  this  arrangement  appears  not 
only  in  children's  drawings  but  in  those 
of  savage  adults. 

The  representation  of  the  head  some- 
times appears  alone,  but  a  strong  ten- 
dency to  bring  in  the  support  of  the 
legs  soon  shows  itself.  This  takes  at 
first  the  crude  device  of  a  couple  of 
vertical  lines  attached  to  the  head  (see 

Fig.  4). 

Coming  now  to  the  mode  of  re- 
presenting the  face,  we  find  at  an 
early  stage  the  commencement  of  an 
attempt  to  differentiate  the  features. 
In  drawings  of  children  of  three  we 
frequently  see  that  while  the  eyes  are 
indicated  by  dots  the  nose  is  given  as  a 

*  Reproduced  from  the  article  already  referred  to,  by  Mr.  Lukem. 


Fig.  4. 


176 


Children's  Ways. 


short  vertical  line.  Similarly  when  the  mouth  appears 
it  does  so  commonly  as  a  horizontal  line.  We  notice 
that  more  attention  is  given  to  the  problem  of  placing 
a  feature  than  to  that  of  making  a  likeness  of  it 
Indeed  this  first  drawing  is  largely  a  pointing  out 
or  noting  down  of  features  without  any  serious  effort 
to  draw  them.  The  representation  is  a  kind  of  local 
description  rather  than  a  true  drawing.  Curious 
differences  appear  in  respect  of  the  completeness  of 


Fig.  5. 


this  linear  noting  or  enumerating  of  features.  The 
nose  more  particularly  appears  and  disappears  in  a 
capricious  way  in  the  drawings  of  the  same  child. 

Odd  differences,  reflecting  differences  of  intelli- 
gence, show  themselves  in  the  management  of  this 
diagram  of  the  human  face.  One  child,  a  Jamaica 
girl  of  seven,  went  so  far  as  to  draw  the  face  with 
only  one  eye  (Fig.  5).  Again  though,  as  I  have  said, 
a  child  will  try  to  give  a  correct  local  arrangement, 


First  Pencillings.  177 

for  example  putting  the  nose  between  and  below  the 
eyes,  he  does  not  always  reach  accuracy  of  localisa- 
tion. Many  children  habitually  set  the  two  eyes 
far  up  towards  the  crown  of  the  head,  as  in  Fig.  6. 
When  the  features  begin  to  be  represented  by  some- 
thing more  like  a  form  we  find  in  most  cases  a 
curious  want  of  proportion.  The  eye,  for  instance,  is 
often  greatly  exaggerated  ;  so  is  the  mouth,  which  is 
sometimes  drawn  right  across  the  face,  as  in  Fig.  6. 

As  the  drawing  progresses  we  note  a  kind  of 
evolution  of  the  features.  In  the  case  of  the  eye,  for 
example,  we  may  often  trace  a  gradual  development, 
the  dot  being  displaced  by  a  small  circle  or  ovoid,  this 
last  supplemented  by  a  second  outer  circle,  or  by  an 
arch  or  pair  of  arches.  In  like  manner  the  mouth, 
from  being  a  bare  symbolic  indication,  gradually  takes 
on  form  and  likeness.  There  appears  a  rude  attempt 
to  picture  the  mouth  cavity  and  to  show  those  in- 
teresting accessories,  the  teeth.  The  nose,  too,  tries 
to  look  more  like  a  nose  by  help  of  various  ingenious 
expedients,  as  by  drawing  an  angle,  a  triangle,  and 
a  kind  of  scissors  arrangement  in  which  the  holders 
stand  for  the  nostrils  (see  Fig.  7  (a)  and  {d) ;  compare 
above.  Fig.  4). 

Ears,  hair,  and  the  other  adjuncts  come  in  later  as 
after-thoughts.  Much  the  same  characteristics  are 
observable  in  the  treatment  of  these  features. 

The   Vile  Body. 

At  first,  as  I  have  observed,  the  trunk  is  commonly 
omitted.  The  indifference  of  the  young  mind  to  this 
is  seen  in  the  obstinate  persistence  of  the  first  scheme 


178 


Children's  Ways. 


of  a  head  set  on  two  legs,  even  when  two  arms  are 
added  and  attached  to  the  sides  of  the  head.  Indeed 
a  child  will  sometimes  complete  the  drawing  by  adding 
feet  and  hands  before  he  troubles  to  bring  in  the  trunk 
(see  Fig.  8). 

From  this  common  way  of  spiking  the  head  on  two 
forked  or  upright  legs  there  occurs  an  important  de- 
viation. The  contour  of  the  head  may  be  left  incom- 
plete, and  the  upper  part  of  the  curve  be  run  on  into 


Fig.  7  (a). 

the  leg-lines,  as  in  the  accompanying  example  by  a 
Jamaica  girl  (Fig.  8). 

The  drawing  of  the  trunk  may  commence  in 
different  ways.  Sometimes  a  lame  attempt  is  made 
to  indicate  it  by  leaving  space  between  the  head 
and  the  legs,  that  is,  by  not  attaching  the  legs  to 
the  head.  Another  contrivance  is  where  the  space 
between  the  legs  is  shown  to  be  the  trunk  by  shading 
or  by  drawing  a  vertical  row  of  buttons.  In  other 
cases  the  contour  of  the  head  appears  to  be  elongated 


First  Pencillings. 


179 


so  as  to  serve  for  head  and  trunk.  A  better  expedient 
is  drawing  a  line  across  the  two  vertical  lines  and  so 
marking  off  the  trunk  (see  Fig.  9  (a)  to  (d)).      In 


Fig.  8. 


Fig.  9  (aV 


Fig.  9  ib). 


Fig.  9  (cX 


^  Fig.  9  (a)  is  a  reproduction  of  a  drawing  of  a  girl  of  four  and  • 
half  years,  from  Mr.  Lakens'  article.  P^ 


i8o 


Children's  Ways. 


drawings  made  by  Brazilian  Indians  we  see  another 
device,  viz.^  a  pinching  in  of  the  vertical  lines  (see 
Fig.  9  {€)). 

After  the  trunk  has  been  recognised  by  the  young 
draughtsman  he  is  apt  to  show  his  want  of  respect 
for  it  by  making  it  absurdly  small  in  proportion  to 
the  head,  as  in  Fig.  lo.  It  assumes  a  variety  of 
shapes,  triangular,  rectangular,  and  circular  or  ovoid, 
this  last  being,  however,  the  most  common. 

At  this  stage  there  is  no  attempt  to  show  the 
joining  on  of  the  head  to  the  trunk  by  means  of  the 


Fig.  9  («). 


Fig.  la 


Fig.  II. 


neck.  When  this  is  added  it  is  apt  to  take  the  ex- 
aggerated look  of  caricature,  as  in  Fig.  1 1. 

A  curious  feature  which  not  infrequently  appears 
in  this  first  drawing  of  the  trunk  is  the  doubling  of 
the  corporeal  ovoid,  one  being  laid  upon  the  other. 
As  this  appears  when  a  neck  is  added  it  looks  like  a 
clumsy  attempt  to  indicate  the  pinch  at  the  waist— 
presumably  the  female  waist  (see  Fig.  12). 

The  introduction  of  the  arms  is  very  uncertain.    To 


First  Pencillings. 


i8i 


the  child,  as  also  to  the  savage,  the  arms  seem  far  less 
important  than  the  legs,  and  are  omitted  in  rather 
more  than  one  case  out  of  two.  After  all,  the  divine 
portion,  the  head,  can  be  supported  very  well  with- 
out their  help. 

The  arms,  being  the  thin  lanky  members,  are,  like 
the  legs,  commonly  represented  by  lines.  The  same 
thing  is  noticeable  in  the  drawings  of  savages.  They 
appear,  in  the  front  view  of  the  figure,  as  more  or  less 


Fig.  12. 


Fig.  13. 


stretched  out,  so  as  to  show  beyond  the  trunk ;  and 
their  appearance  always  gives  a  certain  liveliness  to 
the  form,  an  air  of  joyous  expression,  as  if  to  say, 
"  Here  I  am  I "  (see  Fig.  13,  the  drawing  of  a  boy  of 
six). 

In  respect  of  their  structure  a  process  of  gradual 
evolution  may  be  observed.  The  primal  rigidity  of 
the  straight  line  yields  later  on  to  the  freedom  of  an 
organ.      Thus  an  attempt  is  made  to  represent  by 


l82 


Children's  Ways. 


means  of  a  curve  the  look  of  the  bent  arm,  as  in  the 
accompanying  drawing  by  a  boy  of  five  (Fig.  14).  In 
other  cases  the  angle  of  the  elbow  is  indicated.  This 
last  improvement  seems  to  come  comparatively  late 
in  children's  drawings,  which  here,  as  in  other  respects, 
lag  behind  the  crudest  outline  sketches  of  savages. 

The  mode  of  insertion  or  attachment  of  the  arms 
is  noteworthy.  Where  they  are  added  to  the  trunk- 
less  figure  they  sometimes  appear  as  emerging  from 


Fig.  15. 


Fig.  14. 

the  sides  of  the  head,  as  in  a  drawing  by  a  boy  of  two 
and  a  half  years  (see  Fig.  15),  but  more  commonly, 
from  the  point  of  junction  of  the  head  and  legs  (see 
above,  Fig.  7  (d)).  After  the  trunk  is  added  they 
appear  to  sprout  from  almost  any  point  of  this.  It 
may  be  added  that  their  length  is  often  grotesquely 
exaggerated. 

The  arm  in  these  childish  drawings  early  develops 
the  interesting  adjunct  of  a  hand.     Like  other  features 


First  Pencillings. 


183 


this  is  apt  at  first  to  be  amusingly  forced  into  promi- 
nence by  its  size. 

The  treatment  of  the  hand  illustrates  in  a  curious 
way  the  process  of  artistic  evolution,  the  movement 
from  a  bare  symbolic  indication  towards  a  more  life- 
like representation.  Thus  one  of  the  earliest  and 
rudest  devices  I  have  met  with,  though  in  a  few  cases 
only,  is  that  of  drawing  strokes  across  the  line  of  the 
arm  to  serve  as  signs  of  fingers  (Fig.  16). 

It  is  an  important  advance  when  the  branching  lines 


Fig.  16. — Humpty 
Dumpty  on  the  wall. 


Fig.  17. 


are  set  in  a  bunch-like  arrangement  at  the  extremity 
of  the  arm-line,  Fiom  this  point  the  transition  is 
easy  to  the  common  "toasting-fork"  arrangement, 
in  which  the  finger-lines  are  set  on  a  hand-line  (see 
above,  Figs.  8  and  7  (d)).  From  this  stage,  again, 
there  is  but  a  step  to  the  first  crude  attempt  to  give 
contour  first  to  the  hand  alone,  as  in  Fig.  13,  and 
then  to  hand  and  fingers,  as  in  Figs.  11  and  17. 

Various  odd  arrangements  appear  in  the  first  at- 
tempts to  outline  arm  and  hand.     In  one,  which  occurs 


184  Children's  Ways. 

not  infrequently,  a  thickened  arm  is  made  to  expand 
into  something  like  a  fan-shaped 
hand,  as  in  Fig.  18. 

There  is  a  corresponding  de- 
velopment of  the  foot  from  a 
bare  indication  by  a  line  to 
something  like  a  form  in  which 
toes  are  commonly  represented 
by  much  the  same  devices  as 
fingers.  In  the  better  drawings, 
Fig.  18.  however,  one  notes   signs   of  a 

tendency  to  hide  the  toes,  and  to  indicate  the  notch 
between  the  heel  and  the  sole  of  the  boot 

Side  Views  of  Things. 

So  far,  I  have  dealt  only  with  the  child's  treatment 
of  the  front  view  of  the  human  face  and  figure.  New 
and  highly  curious  characteristics  begin  to  appear  when 
he  attempts  to  give  the  profile  aspect. 

A  child,  it  must  be  remembered,  prefers  the  full  face 
arrangement,  as  he  wants  to  indicate  all  its  important 
features,  especially  the  two  eyes.  "  If,"  writes  a 
Kindergarten  teacher,  "  one  makes  drawings  in  profile 
for  quite  little  children,  they  will  not  be  satisfied  un- 
less they  see  two  eyes ;  and  sometimes  they  turn  a 
picture  round  to  see  the  other  side."  This  reminds 
one  of  a  story  told,  I  believe,  by  Catlin  of  the  Indian 
chief,  who  was  so  angry  at  a  representation  of  himself 
in  profile  that  the  unfortunate  artist  went  in  fear  of 
his  life. 

At  the  same  time  children  do  not  rest  content  with 
this  front  view.    After  a  time  they  try,  without  any  aid 


First  Pencilllngs.  185 

from  the  teacher,  to  grope  their  way  to  a  new  mode  of 
representing  the  face  and  figure,  which,  though  it  would 
be  an  error  to  call  it  a  profile  drawing,  has  some  of  its 
characteristics. 

The  first  clear  indication  of  an  attempt  to  give  the 
profile  aspect  of  the  face  is  the  introduction  of  the 
side  view  of  the  nose  into  the  contour.  The  little 
observer  is  soon  impressed  by  the  characteristic,  well- 
marked  outline  of  the  nose  in  profile ;  and  the  motive 
to  bring  this  in  is  strengthened  by  his  inability,  already 
illustrated,  to  make  much  of  the  front  view  of  the  organ. 
The  addition  is  made  either  by  adding  a  spindle-like 
projection  after  completing  the  circle  of  the  head,  as  in 
Figs.  6  and  7  {a),  or  more  adroitly  by  modifying  the 
circular  outline.  The  other  features,  the  eyes  and  the 
mouth,  are  given  in  full  view  as  before. 

It  may  well  seem  a  puzzle  to  us  how  a  normal 
child  of  five  or  six  can  complacently  set  down  this 
self-contradictory  scheme  of  a  human  head.  How 
little  any  idea  of  consistency  troubles  the  young 
draughtsman  is  seen  in  the  fact  that  he  will,  not 
infrequently,  reach  the  absurdity  of  doubling  the 
nose,  retaining  the  vertical  line  which  did  duty 
in  the  first  front  view  along  with  the  added  nasal 
projection  (see  Fig.   19). 

This  appearance  of  the  nose  as  a  lateral  projection 
is  apt  to  be  followed  by  a  similar  side  view  of  the  ear 
(as  seen  in  Fig.  19),  of  the  beard  and  other  adjuncts 
which  the  little  artist  wants  to  display  in  the  most 
advantageous  way. 

Some  children  stop  at  this  mixed  scheme,  continu- 
ing to  give  the  two  eyes  and  the  mouth,  as  in  the 
front  view,  and  frequently  also  the  front  view  of  the 
13 


i86 


Children's  Ways. 


body.  This  becomes  a  fixed  conventional  way  of 
representing  a  man.  With  children  of  finer  percep- 
tion the  transition  to  a  correct  profile  view  may  be 
carried  much  further.  Yet  a  lingering  fondness  for 
the  two  eyes  is  apt  to  appear  at  a  later  stage  in  this 
development  of  a  consistent  treatment  of  the  profile ; 
a  feeling  that  the  second  eye  is  not  in  its  right  place 
prompting  the  artist  in  some  cases  to  place  it  outside 
the  face  (see  Fig.  20  {a)  and  {b)). 


A  miner. 


Fig.  20  (fl). 


Fig.  20  (6). 


Other  confusions  are  apt  to  appear  in  these  early 
attempts  at  drawing  a  man  in  profile.  The  trunk,  for 
example,  is  very  frequently  represented  in  front  view 
with  a  row  of  buttons  running  down  the  middle, 
though  the  head  and  feet  seem  clearly  shown  in  side 
view.  The  arms,  too,  not  uncommonly  are  spread  out 
from  the  two  sides  of  the  trunk  just  as  in  the  front 
view. 

It  would  take  too  long  to  offer  a  complete  expla- 
nation of  these  characteristics  of  children's  drawings. 


First  Pencillings.  187 

I  must  content  myself  here  with  touching  on  one  or 
two  of  the  main  causes  at  work. 

First  of  all,  then,  it  seems  pretty  evident  that  most 
children  when  they  begin  to  draw  are  not  thinking  of 
setting  down  a  likeness  of  what  they  see  when  they 
look  at  an  object  In  the  first  simple  stage  we  have 
little  more  than  a  jotting  down  of  a  number  of  linear 
notes,  a  kind  of  rude  and  fragmentary  description  in 
lines  rather  than  in  words.  Here  a  child  aims  at 
bringing  into  his  scheme  what  seems  to  him  to  have 
most  interest  and  importance,  such  as  the  features  of  the 
face,  the  two  legs,  and  so  forth.  In  the  later  and  more 
ambitious  attempt  to  draw  a  man  in  profile  the  old 
impulse  to  set  down  what  seems  important  continues 
to  show  itself.  Although  the  little  draughtsman  has 
decided  to  give  to  the  nose,  to  the  ear,  and  possibly  to 
the  manly  beard  and  the  equally  manly  pipe,  the  ad- 
vantage of  a  side  view,  he  goes  on  exhibiting  those 
sovereign  members,  the  two  round  eyes,  and  the 
mouth  with  its  flash  of  serried  teeth,  in  their  full  front- 
view  glory.  It  is  enough  for  him  to  know  that  the 
lord  of  creation  has  these  members,  and  he  does  not 
trouble  about  so  small  a  matter  as  our  capability  of 
seeing  them  all  at  the  same  moment.  In  like  manner 
a  child  will  sometimes,  on  first  clothing  the  human 
form,  exhibit  arms  and  legs  through  their  covering 
(see  Fig.  21  (a)  and  (d)).  All  this  shows  that  even  at 
this  later  and  decidedly  "  knowing  "  stage  of  his  craft 
he  is  not  much  nearer  the  point  of  view  of  our  pictorial 
art  than  he  was  in  the  earlier  stage  of  bald  symbolism. 

Much  the  same  kind  of  thing  shows  itself  in  a 
child's  manner  of  treating  the  forms  of  animals,  which 
his  pencil  is  wont  to  attack  soon  after  that  of  man. 


i88 


Children's  Ways. 


Here  the  desire  to  exhibit  what  is  characteristic  and 
worthy  naturally  leads  at  the  outset  to  a  representa- 
tion of  the  body  in  profile.  A  horse  is  rather  a 
poor  affair  looked  at  from  the  front.  A  child  must 
show  his  four  legs,  as  well  as  his  neck  and  his  tail. 
But  though  the  profile  seems  to  be  the  aspect  selected, 
the  little  penciller  by  no  means  confines  himself  to  a 
strict  record  of  this.     The  four  legs  have  to  be  shown 


Fig.  21  (a)  (from  General 
Pitt  Rivers'  collection 
of  drawings). 


Fig.2i(i) 'repro- 
duced from  a 
drawing  pub- 
lished by  Mr. 
H.T.Lukens), 


not  half  hidden  by  overlappings  but  standing  quite 
clear  one  of  another.  The  head,  too,  must  be  turned 
towards  the  spectator,  or  at  least  given  in  a  mixed 
scheme — half  front  view,  half  side  view  (see  Fig.  22  (a) 
and  {d)). 

A  like  tendency  to  get  behind  the  momentary 
appearance  of  an  object  and  to  present  to  view  what 
the  child  J^nows  to  be  there  is  seen  in  early  drawings 
of  men  on   horseback,   in   boats,   railway  carriages, 


First  Pencillings.  189 

houses,  and  so  forth.  Here  the  interest  in  the  human 
form  sets  at  defiance  the  limitations  of  perspective, 
and  shows  us  the  rider's  second  leg  through  the 
horse's  body,  the  rower's  body  through  the  boat, 
and  so  forth. 

The  widespread  appearance  of  these  tendencies 
among  children  of  different  European  countries,  of 
half-civilised  peoples,  like  the  Jamaica  blacks,  as  well 
as  among  adult  savages,  shows  how  deeply  rooted  in 
the  natural  mind  is  this  quaint  notion  of  drawing. 

At  the  same  time  there  are,  as  I  have  allowed,  im- 


Fig.  22  (b). — A  quadruped. 
Fig.  22  (fl). — A  horse. 

portant  differences  in  children's  drawings.  A  few 
have  the  eye  and  the  artistic  impulse  needed  for 
picturing,  roughly  at  least,  the  look  of  an  object.  I 
have  lately  looked  through  the  drawings  of  a  little 
girl  in  a  cultured  home  where  every  precaution  was 
taken  to  shut  out  the  influences  of  example  and 
educational  guidance.  When  at  the  age  of  four 
years  eight  months  she  first  drew  the  profile  of  the 
human  face  she  quite  correctly  put  in  only  one  eye, 
and  added  a  shaded  projection  for  nose  (see  Fig.  23). 
In  like  manner  she  was  from  the  first  careful  to  show 
only  one  leg  of  the  rider,  one  rein  over  the  horse's 


190  Children's  Ways. 

neck,  and  so  forth  ;  and  would  sometimes,  with  a 
child's  sweet  thoughtfulness,  explain  to  her  mother 
why  she  proceeded  in  this  way.  Yet  even  in  the  case 
of  this  child  one  could  observe  now  and  again  a 
rudiment  of  the  tendency  to  bring  in  what  is  hidden. 
Thus  in  one  drawing  she  shows  the  rider's  near  leg 
through  the  trouser ;  in  another  she  introduces  the 
front  view  of  a  horse's  nostrils  (if  not  also  of  the  ears) 


Fig.  23. 


in  what  is  otherwise  a  drawing  of  the  profile  (see 
Fig.  24  (a)  and  {b)). 

Yet  while  children's  drawings  are  thus  so  far  away 
from  those  reproductions  of  the  look  of  a  thing  which 
we  call  pictures,  they  are  after  all  a  kind  of  rude 
art  Even  the  amusing  errors  which  they  contain, 
though  a  shock  to  our  notions  of  pictorial  semblance, 
have  at  least  this  point  of  analogy  to  art,  that  they 
aim  at  selecting  and  presenting  what  is  characteristic 


First  Pencillings. 


191 


and  valuable.  In  many  of  the  rude  drawings  with 
which  we  have  here  been  occupied  we  may  detect 
faint  traces  of  individual  originality,  especially  in  the 
endeavour  to  give  life  and  expression  to  the  form. 
To  this  it  is  right  to  add  that  some  drawings  of 
young  children  from  two  to  six  which  I  have  seen 
are  striking  proofs  of  the  early  development  now  and 
again  of  the  artist's  feeling  for  what  is  characteristic 


Fig.  24  (a). 


in  line,  and  for  the  economic  suggestiveness  of  a  bare 
stroke  (see  Fig.  25  (a)  and  {d)\  When  once  a  child's 
eye  is  focussed  for  the  prettiness  of  things  the  dawn 
of  aesthetic  perception  is  pretty  sure  to  bring  with  it  a 
more  serious  effort  to  reproduce  their  look.  Among 
children,  as  among  adults,  it  is  love  which  makes  the 
artist 


192  Children's  Ways. 


Fig.  a4  (P). 


First  Pencillings. 


193 


Fig.  25  (a)  (drawn  by  a  boy  aged 
two  years  one  month). 


Fig.  25  (b)  (drawn  by  a  girl  ol 
five  and  a  half  years). 


(5) 


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